Why Trump’s Endorsements Should Scare Your Pants Off
Earlier this week, an African-American protester was sucker-punched by a 78-year-old man in a cowboy hat at a Trump rally in North Carolina. The video went viral, and reporters later tracked down John McGraw, the red-faced Trumpthusiast who’d thrown the punch. McGraw explained why he’d belted Rakeem Jones:
“Number one, we don’t know if he’s ISIS,” McGraw said.
One has to commend the Inside Edition reporter doing the interview for not bursting out laughing, or dropping to the ground in shock, at this moment. McGraw went on:
“The next time we see him, we might have to kill him,” he said. “We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.”
That same night, Trump told Anderson Cooper he wasn’t backing down from his plan to bar all Muslims from entering the country. “I think Islam hates us,” he said, adding, “It’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who is who. We have to be very vigilant.”
These episodes are like a child’s game of “telephone,” only played with bone-ignorant adults. The game starts when Trump personifies “Islam” under one label, apparently not realizing that this represents an awesomely diverse collection of people who collectively represent about a quarter of the world’s population.
How will his plan work? Will he slap an outright ban on everyone who isn’t a nun from Liechtenstein? How is American commerce going to work when we cut off incoming travel from the 49 countries that have Muslim majorities? Will the new Trump projection of the globe no longer include the continent of Africa? Will the ban extend to Sunnis and Shiites, or does Trump not know the difference? (Since he was iffy on “Kurds” versus “Quds,” I’m guessing the latter.)
Trump’s Islam-ban idea fits in perfectly with his strategy for dealing with most problems, which is to physically eliminate anything that makes him even slightly uncomfortable, even at great cost, and even when it would be a million times easier to do ten minutes of reading in search of more targeted solutions.
Remember, Trump says he only wants to close the borders to all Muslims “until we can figure out what’s going on.” This means he actually believes it will take less time, logistically, to wall off the United States to 1.6 billion people inhabiting every time zone on Earth than it would be to craft a strategy for dealing with a relatively tiny band of religious dingbats roaming Mesopotamia in search of an apocalyptic showdown with the army of Rome.
In reality, “until we can figure out what’s going on” means “never,” because if Trump had any inclination to “figure it out,” he’d do it before he created the mother of all logistical and diplomatic nightmares, not after.
Trump’s ignorance is monstrous, but it’s nothing compared to that of his supporters, who apparently take “we don’t know who is who” to mean that ISIS could be just about anyone not wearing a NASCAR uniform. This is like the Red Scare all over again, only dumber and more racist. We’re like a week away from seeing Trumpshirts in Texas or Alabama gang-tackle a college student for eating tabouleh.
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