All Trumped out

I know I’m supposed to have a Take on big news, especially when it relates to foreign affairs, terrorism, and politics, but I have to say that I’ve got nothing when it comes to Donald Trump’s latest garbage. It’s far too late in the process to say that Trump is a joke candidate, but he is playing a very dangerous game with this primary. Monday’s declaration that we should ban all Muslims from coming into the United States, even American Muslims who are abroad at the moment for whatever reason, was patently an attempt to say something inflammatory enough that the media would talk about “what Trump just said” rather than the poll that came out on Monday that showed Trump falling behind fellow barking loon Ted Cruz in Iowa. It worked, too, and so will the next absurd thing he says, which will no doubt also be intended to deflect serious attention from some new story that might make Trump look bad or weak. The content of what Trump says is irrelevant; all that matters is that he keeps raising his own bar for saying ridiculous and offensive things that play to the basest fears and prejudices of his supporters.

What do you say or write about an idea, and a person, so outrageously outside any boundary of reason or decency? How do you formulate a rational response to a political candidacy that is irrational by design? At The Guardian, in a piece I urge you to read, Jeb Lund makes a very compelling case that you don’t have to:

Sometimes it’s enough for an idea to merely be stupid, wretched, inhumane and, if we need a fourth for bridge, unconstitutional. Sometimes a refusal to be morally impoverished is reason enough. Sometimes, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, we can point to a meringued trash golem effervescing with sewage ideas like Donald Trump and say: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

I hope that really is enough, because what Trump is doing has crossed the line from political tactic to genuine incitement. Just because what Donald Trump says doesn’t matter to Donald Trump, that doesn’t mean it can’t have very serious real-world implications. I don’t think, even in the terrified America of 2015, that you can win the presidency on Islamophobia, but I’m also starting to think there’s a pretty good chance I’m wrong about that. Regardless, even if he doesn’t win the presidency, or even the Republican nomination, he’s still fanning the flames of something that could be very dangerous to this nation and the people who are trying to live in it. He’s contributing directly to things like this:

It was my first Minnesota Vikings game and my first NFL game. I am not new to football, though. As an undergrad at Boston College, I went to many Eagles games, and I played junior varsity football. I knew what to expect on the field. I was excited, and, as I found my seat, I thought about bringing my family to a game in the new stadium.

What I didn’t expect was for a man to push aside other people and point his finger in my face, demanding to know if I was a refugee. He needed to make sure I wasn’t a refugee, he said. There was anger in his face and vehemence in his accusation.

10-to-1 says the finger-pointer is a Trump supporter.

The radicalization in Trump’s base and the radicalization that leads people to join ISIS aren’t all that different. They both come out of a fear of the modern, of the unknown, and a profound sense of disconnect with the world around you. They both come out of a desire to blame others for your fears and sufferings, and a simultaneous desire to belong to a group of people whose thoughts and feelings are just as toxic and hate-filled as your own. We often, to an absurd degree, insist that Muslims denounce ISIS’s actions and ideology; when are we going to demand that milquetoast Republicans do more than just politely disagree with Trump’s message and actually take a stand against what he increasingly represents?

Donald Trump incites his base’s radicalization in the same way that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi incites radicalization among his followers, and while Baghdadi certainly has more to answer for than Trump, I fear the day is going to come when we’re not just talking about somebody pointing fingers at somebody else at a football game, or somebody tossing a pig’s head at a mosque. This Trump phenomenon is an increasingly scary thing, and it’s time we all started treating it that way.

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