Donald Trump, the current leader in the Republican party’s race for the US presidential nomination, has passed from being a loud-mouthed joke to become a serious threat to American democracy and by extension the rest of the world. It is not just a question of his racist views. His description of Mexicans as “murderers and rapists” and his deep Islamophobia demonstrated in his call to ban all Muslim visitors to the United States are bad enough. But the Trump campaign has taken an even more sinister turn.
His public meetings have come to resemble Nazi party or Italian fascist rallies. It is not simply that Trump apes the Italian dictator with his head thrown back and his mouth set in a determined pout as he nods his head at the virtue of the rubbish he has just spouted. Like the Nazis, he has now taken to having his meetings policed to throw out anyone who demonstrates any disagreement with what he is saying.
Hecklers were once an honored inconvenience of US politics and part of the election rough and tumble Wise candidates practiced smart one-liners to put down awkward interruptions. Not so, Trump. Up until a few weeks ago, those who interrupted him were escorted from the auditoria by generally polite security men. But there has been a frightening change. Now, before the great man steps on stage, audiences are encouraged to turn on any hecklers and yell “Trump, Trump, Trump,” in their faces. Thus primed, it only takes a few snide comments from Trump before his supporters start baying at any opposition.
And Trump encourages this violence, recently telling security men to throw out one heckler but not let him take his coat. "It’s freezing outside” yelled Trump to wild cheers; “Let him freeze without his coat”. A result of the mob hysteria that this man is generating saw an entirely innocent young Muslim woman wearing a head scarf, who had said nothing but merely come to hear what the candidate had to say, turned on by those sitting near her and denounced. Even though she protested that she had said nothing but had only been listening, she was manhandled out of her seat and thrown out of the building. Her cries that she had done nothing were ignored.
Back in the hall Trump glowed at what he considered a triumph and warned that soon there would be nobody able to disrupt his meetings. This ominous attitude also applies to the press. Camera crews are being told that they can only focus on Trump. If they start to film protests, they themselves are ejected from the hall, most recently with a local policeman saying that if a news team did not go, they would be arrested for trespass.
This is not America. This is not even the 1950s anti-communist witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities. It is more threatening, more dangerous than even that. The idea that a strutting brute like Trump could even be considered as an occupant of the world’s most powerful office is absolutely appalling. In an act of what seems to be collective insanity, normally decent Republican Americans are allowing themselves to be terrified into backing a bombastic bigot who threatens the very freedoms on which their great country has been built.
