I can think of very few Americans I have met and come to dislike. The USA is a country I have enjoyed visiting and I have plenty of American friends and acquaintances. I've even been to Texas. Perhaps I have just encountered very few of those who could be described as the US Taliban. I am thinking, of course, of people who are a combination of narrow-minded, puritanical, racist, intolerant, gun-loving and, let's not beat about the Bush, downright thick. As well as resisting sensible controls on private possession of lethal weapons, they support such monstrosities as Ku Klux Klan. Step forward one of the presidential contenders ...
Just when I was wondering whether and when I should weigh in on the United States presidential election, along comes a piece that magnificently embraces all I might have wished to say about one candidate.
"How the hell can anyone who calls themselves a Christian vote for Donald Trump?” asks Cole Moreton in the Independent of Sunday, only two issues now from exticntion.
Moreton proceeds to describe this fabulously wealthy but deeply unpleasant individual as a “racist, misogynist hate-monger who supports torture, ridicules the disabled and wants to ban all Muslims from America” … who nevertheless stands horribly close to winning the Republican nomination and maybe becoming president.
The focus of the article is the US Christian vote in a nation “built with a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other … in particular, the group the commentators always call Evangelicals”.
Whatever happened, Moreton wonders, to Jesus’s second great commandment to love your neighbour as yourself? “Trump whirls it around above his head and throws it out of the room faster than a heckler being chucked out by his security goons.”
He cites opposing voices – Trump’s “dangerous rhetoric” is ”not only racist, but also fascist, with all the dangers that ideology” - but concedes that there are still 60 to 65 million conservative Evangelical believers for Trump to woo “and it seems to be working”.
Other Moreton points in bullet form:
• He makes fun of disability. He calls Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists. He won’t condemn the Ku Klux Klan. He promises to ban Syrian refugees from America. Trump wants a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.
• He would “bomb the s*** out of Isis” and kill the families – yes, the husbands, wives and children – of terrorists. He praises the use of torture for interrogation.
• As The Washington Post put it: “A more scripturally, spiritually flawed man than Donald Trump would be hard to find.”
We could almost laugh, or just turn away thinking it no place of ours to intrude on private grief. But what Americans do in November will have an impact the world over. Hillary Clinton may not be the epitome of political virtuousness, but she seems saintly by comparison.
And it brings me to my solitary orihal thohght: can’t we just change the rules and keep Obama?
* Salut! awaits a response from Mr Trump. If received, it will be published without further comment from me.
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