Donald Trump’s ugly, divisive, demagogic politics are barely even news anymore. His comments on Mexican “rapists” coming to the US and on Carly Fiorina (“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”), his mocking of Asian accents and of a disabled reporter, his irresponsible birther baloney, his inaccurate tweet about “whites killed by blacks” - it’s all beginning to run together in a giant soup of bigotry and intolerance. Voters have recognised his foolishness for what it is.
But now he’s outdone himself. On Monday, Trump demanded a “total and complete shutdown” of immigration by Muslims, an idea so far out of the mainstream that Jeb Bush called him “unhinged” and Sen. Lindsey Graham called him a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
Unsatisfied with linking a billion and a half Muslims to terrorism, Trump defended his comments on Tuesday by invoking President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to classify Germans, Japanese and Italians as “enemy aliens” during World War II. No, Trump insisted, he wasn’t calling for internment camps for Muslims today. But asked whether he would have supported interning people of Japanese ancestry during the war, Trump told Time magazine: “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer. I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there.”
Surely Trump knows (or maybe he doesn’t) that the Japanese internment is one of the great embarrassments of American history. In 1988, President Reagan offered a long-overdue formal apology and compensation to 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (many of them US citizens) unfairly incarcerated during the war.
No-nothingism has its charms. Populism is popular. But Donald Trump’s demagoguery long ago ceased to be amusing.
After his controversial call to bar Muslims from entering the US, leading Dubai-based retailer Lifestyle stopped selling products from the brand owned by Trump. It said it was pulling those products from its chain of home decor stores across the region, because it “values and respects the sentiments of all its customers.”
Dubai real estate firm DAMAC Properties building a $6bn golf complex with Trump yesterday stripped the property of his name and image amid a backlash over the US presidential candidate’s remarks which triggered an international uproar.
DAMAC Properties had initially said it would stand by Trump.
Religious leaders in Asia also condemned Trump’s inflammatory comments on Muslims, warning that the US presidential hopeful was helping the Islamic State group’s cause and diminishing America’s global stature.
In Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan, together home to more than a third of the world’s 1.5bn followers of Islam, anger at the bouffant billionaire’s incendiary proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US ran high.
Trump’s presidential bid has met with widespread ridicule, with the mainstream media struggling to take the former reality TV star seriously and doubting whether he could succeed at the ballot box, despite his popularity in the polls.
A look at polls from the past three presidential elections offers little to excite the businessman: none of those leading in the polls this far ahead of the election ended up winning their party’s nomination.