“This Joke’s Not Funny Anymore”: Donald Trump’s Talk Of Registering Muslims And Closing Mosques Is Deeply Un-American
Donald Trump is no longer funny.
For the last several months, the former reality TV star has provided comic relief as the front-runner in the Republican presidential field – especially if, like me, you have remained in the camp that believes that Trump is not going to be the GOP nominee, let alone president of the United States. Granted, his antics have been juvenile, offensive and reflected an unappealing seam in the national character, but his focus on dumb insults and general oafishness kept Trump’s pronouncements for the most part in the realm of clumsy diversion. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote yesterday, “Since so much of what Trump says is hot air, it’s tempting to dismiss all of it as mere rabble-rousing or showboating.”
But things have changed.
Trump’s rhetoric since last week’s Paris attacks has taken a dark turn and, as Greg Sargent writes in The Washington Post today, it’s spiraling downward: “[I]n the endless Trumpathon that the GOP primaries have become, every idea, no matter how startling at first hearing, must always be superseded, or Trumped, by a new, yuuuger idea.” So in a matter of days he went from entertaining the idea of shutting down houses of worship to saying that we have “absolutely no choice” but to do so; he doesn’t dismiss appalling notions like forcing certain religious groups to register or carry special religiously based identification. The fact that the religion in question is Islam is beside the point – this sort of targeting and discrimination is fundamentally un-American as is his apparent belief in “security” uber alles. (“Some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” he told Yahoo News this week – and surely the trains will run on time as well.)
Trump told Yahoo News that “certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy.” As my colleague Emily Arrowood noted this morning: “It can’t happen here used to be a warning that it really can if we’re not careful – not a campaign promise that it will.”
And Cassidy again:
Trump must know that his proposals don’t make sense, but he’s pushing on regardless. He has moved from rabble-rousing to demagoguery, or something even uglier. And this time, sadly, we have no option but to take him seriously.
I am deeply uncomfortable with comparisons to the Nazis. They are thrown around too lightly and inherently cheapen the sheer scope of the evil acts committed by Hitler and his henchmen. But that doesn’t give lesser nods to fascism a pass until they rise to Holocaust levels; and this talk of religious registration and identification flirts with fascism in a way that should be deeply upsetting to Americans of all political stripes.
Trump should explain himself – let him hoist himself on his own petard. And every other candidate in the race should be put on the record as to whether they’re with the GOP’s unhinged front-runner or with basic American values of liberty and justice for all.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U. S. News and World Report, November 20, 2015
“Trump’s National Security Notions Are Crazy—At Best”: Generals Shoot Down Trump’s Fear-Mongering Plans For Muslims
Donald Trump and Ben Carson have spent the last 24 hours proposing bigoted and constitutionally questionable methods for keeping tabs on Muslims and Syrian refugees. And that’s causing some retired generals and admirals to speak out against the GOP presidential frontrunners.
The former top military officers contacted by The Daily Beast said not only are Carson and Trump pushing ideas that are unworkable, they would actually make the situation in Middle East worse.
For example, Retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, said Trump “has proven himself useful in defining the outer limits of the spectrum of thought” and that his ideas were “short of internment camps, but not much.”
“As a lawyer, I’d suggest that among other reasons it is a bad idea is that it violates the freedom of religion clause of the 1st Amendment,” Hutson said. “Victory for the bad guys is to cause us to change what we stand for in fundamental ways. This would do that.”
In a campaign appearance on Thursday, Trump said he would “absolutely” implement a mandatory database system to track Muslims, if elected to the Oval Office. And in an interview with Yahoo that same day, Trump inched toward fascism, refusing to rule out forcing Muslims to carry an identification card identifying their faith.
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
The comments came as Congress passed a controversial bill to stem the flow of Syrian refugees into the U.S. in response to terrorist attacks in Paris last week. It’s a measure that the last two Homeland Security Secretaries opposed.
Trump, on Friday, denied he had suggested a Muslim database. But Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force major general and now a law professor at Duke, expressed puzzlement as to how registration of anyone by religion would add to national security in any way.
“Focusing on religion can be, from a military perspective, counterproductive, as it could serve to incite opposition where they may be none,” he said.
Chris Inglis, a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and former deputy director of the National Security Agency, seemed at a loss with Trump’s latest salvo.
“I have no particular insights on what Mr. Trump might have meant by his remarks but the law is clear,” he said. “Persons residing in the U.S. are afforded the same protection under the law as U.S. citizens, to include freedom from arbitrary interference with their privacy, freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, and the requirement of a court’s probable cause finding to conduct non-consensual government surveillance of the content of a given person’s communications.”
But since this is the 2015 presidential race, Trump was—of course—not alone in spewing hateful remarks about Muslims and Syrian refugees.
Carson, during a campaign stop in Mobile, Alabama, compared some refugees fleeing certain death and persecution in Syria to “a rabid dog.”
“If there’s a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog and you’re probably going to put your children out of the way,” he said, adding later he would call the Humane Society to get the rabid dog help because he loves dogs.
How nice.
Hutson called the analogy “particularly unhelpful for a whole host of reasons.”
Several of the officials said the this type of language is not only counter to the American values, it actually feeds the ISIS propaganda machine.
Retired Army Lieutenant General Charley Otstott called the remarks “extremely inappropriate.”
“Equating refugees to terrorists seeks to exploit the fears of the American public and plays into the hands of Daesh, who want us to be very afraid,” he said, using an alternate term for ISIS. “We should be countering Daesh propaganda rather than taking actions which will most certainly feed their propaganda machine.”
Dunlap, the retired Air Force major general, urged the candidates to resist playing into the hateful rhetoric.
“I would hope that all candidates for public office would refrain from making derogatory characterizations of Syrian refugees, and instead focus on solving the problem,” he said. “If people want to use really negative language, we’ve got ISIS out there for that.”
And yet, the harsh words—and harsh proposals—seem to be only multiplying. In an interview with Fox News, Sen. Marco Rubio, considered by many Republican insiders to be the sane alternative to Trump and Carson’s craziness, said he was open to the idea of shuttering mosques—and any other public space, if they’re somehow associated with extremism.
“It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place—whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site—any place where radicals are being inspired,” he said. “So whatever facility is being used—it’s not just a mosque—any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.”
Reached by phone from New Hampshire where he is campaigning for his friend Lindsey Graham, Sen. John McCain dismissed extremist rhetoric about refugees as “bizarre” and “clearly un-presidential.”
Of the fear-mongering Republican candidates, McCain said, “I think they’re diverting attention from their total lack of knowledge and expertise as to how to address this challenge.”
The Muslim-registry proposed by Donald Trump McCain found particularly “offensive.”
“There’s 3,500 men and women serving in the military that are Muslim,” he said. “Does that mean they’re gonna have to leave where they’re serving overseas, some of them in combat, to register somewhere? That’s really something that I find bizarre and clearly un-presidential.”
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, November 20, 2015
“What’s Worse Than Sex With Pigs?”: Donald Trump Has Gone Beyond Any Conceivable Limits
Write it off as “performance art” if you wish, but in many decades of watching politics I’ve certainly never heard anything quite like Donald Trump’s attacks on Ben Carson yesterday in a CNN interview and an Iowa appearance. AP’s Jill Colvin has the basics:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, brushing aside any recent claims of civility, has equated Ben Carson’s childhood “pathological temper” to the illness of a child molester, questioned his religious awakening and berated voters who support him.
“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” declared Trump during a rally at Iowa Central Community College. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?” For more than an hour and a half Thursday night, the billionaire real estate mogul harshly criticized not only Carson, but many of his other competitors in the race for the GOP presidential nomination….
Trump previewed his attack line in an interview with CNN Thursday in which the businessman pointed to Carson’s own descriptions of his “pathological temper” as a young man.
“That’s a big problem because you don’t cure that,” Trump said. “That’s like, you know, I could say, they say you don’t cure — as an example, child molester. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure the child molester.” Trump also said that “pathological is a very serious disease.”
In his book “Gifted Hands,” Carson described the uncontrollable anger he felt at times while growing up in inner-city Detroit. He wrote that on one occasion he nearly punched his mother and on another he attempted to stab a friend with a knife.
Trump went on to conduct a pantomine of the knife-stabbing incident to show the unlikelihood of ‘Carson’s account, but let’s don’t let him distract us from the unbelievable audacity of comparing a fellow presidential candidate with a child molester.
Most of you have probably heard the ancient and probably apocryphal story of Lyndon Johnson instructing his campaign manager during an early congressional race to spread a rumor that his opponent, a farmer, was in the habit of enjoying carnal relations with his barnyard sows. “Hell, Lyndon,” the campaign manager replied. “You can’t call him a pig-f*****!” Nobody’s going to believe that.” “Yeah,” LBJ supposedly replied. “But I want to hear the SOB deny it.”
Trump’s slur could be worse than that, especially given the crucial distinction that it wasn’t conveyed in a whispering campaign but right out there in public by the candidate himself.
Has Trump finally gone too far? That’s hard to say; if so, the “child molester” line could benefit Carson not only by stimulating sympathy for him but also distracting attention from another emerging story about Carson’s longtime close friendship and business partnership with a dude who pled guilty to felony charges of health insurance fraud.
Regular readers know I have no use for Ben Carson, and I’ve certainly accused him of saying and apparently believing crazy things. But this is beyond any conceivable limits.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 13, 2015
“I Can’t Believe I’m Losing To This Guy”: Trump Asks, ‘How Stupid Are The People Of Iowa?’
There are arguably four top Republican candidates who are in serious contention for their party’s presidential nomination: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. The tensions between them are rising, but the criticisms are increasingly limited to parallel tracks.
Yesterday, for example, half of the quartet – the two who’ve actually been in politics for years – went after each other over immigration. There’s little to suggest Cruz and Rubio are interested in targeting Trump and Carson; they’re too busy focusing on one another.
At the same time, it seems the Amateur Duo aren’t focusing on Cruz and Rubio, so much as they care about each other. Note this report from NBC News’ First Read:
It’s easy to have become a little numb to Donald Trump’s theatrics on the trail over the last five months, but his performance last night in Iowa shook them right back into perspective. NBC’s Katy Tur reports that, during a 96-minute speech, Trump compared Ben Carson’s self-described “pathological temper” to a “disease” like child molestation (“If you’re a child molester, a sick puppy, a child molester, there’s no cure for that – there’s only one cure and we don’t want to talk about that cure, that’s the ultimate cure, no there’s two, there’s death and the other thing.”)
Personal attacks are one thing; baselessly comparing an opponent (who is almost universally popular with your own base!) to a child molester is jaw-dropping.
Your mileage may vary, but for me, Trump’s comments about Carson’s mental health weren’t even the most striking part of the New Yorker’s 96-minute tirade. At the same Iowa appearance, he claimed to know more about ISIS “than the generals do”; he vowed to “bomb the s—” out of Middle Eastern oil fields; and at one point, he even acted out a scene in which Carson claims to have tried to stab someone as a teenager.
“If I did the stuff he said he did, I wouldn’t be here right now. It would have been over. It would have been over. It would have been totally over,” Trump said of Carson. “And that’s who’s in second place. And I don’t get it.”
Referring to Carson’s more incredible claims, Trump added, “How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”
I wasn’t in the room and I didn’t see the full event, but the Washington Post reported, “At first, the audience was quick to laugh at Trump’s sharp insults…. But as the speech dragged on, the applause came less often and grew softer. As Trump attacked Carson using deeply personal language, the audience grew quiet, a few shaking their heads. A man sitting in the back of the auditorium loudly gasped.”
I’ve lost count of how many times in recent months I’ve seen pieces insisting that Trump has finally “gone too far,” so I’d caution against overreacting to this harangue in Iowa last night.
That said, it’s likely Trump’s lengthy rant was born of frustration – he thought he was winning in Iowa, until he saw polls showing Carson surging in the state. Trump, who’s never run for public office before, wants to reclaim his advantage, and evidently believes this is the way to do it.
I’m reminded of the “Saturday Night Live” bit in 1988 when an actor portraying George H.W. Bush delivered a rambling, incoherent answer, prompting Jon Lovitz, portraying Michael Dukakis, to say, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
It’s hard not to think Trump is having the same reaction to Carson’s top-tier standing.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 13, 2015
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