In the land of the sound bite, the six-second clip is king. Candidates for high office in the US often have teams of writers working away constantly to craft a memorable one-liner which will grab the news headlines and focus public attention on them.
By all accounts Donald Trump has no speechwriters. He is supplied with no clever quips to go with his often rambling speeches. Yet ever since he announced his candidacy, Trump has consistently outperformed his Republican Party opponents, not least in terms of headline-making pronouncements.
He has launched personal insults directly at women and a disabled reporter and branded Mexicans as thieves and rapists. And his latest outrageous sound bite is his plan to exclude all Muslims from traveling to the US “until we find out what the hell is going on”.
That Islamophobic call, which contains the unspoken idea that American Muslims and students and workers already in the US should also be corralled, if not actually deported, is now the main theme in Trump’s first TV campaign advertisement.
It is remarkable that he has got this far in the campaign and in the opinion polls without, until now, spending a dime on prime-time TV slots. The man originally dismissed by the political establishment as a loudmouthed, ignorant maverick has demonstrated considerable cunning. His disgusting call to discriminate against Muslims was justified by a reference to the Second World War internment of all Americans of Japanese origin. Amazingly, none of his Republican opponents was prepared to admit that this vicious reaction 75 years ago to the horror of the Pearl Harbor attack was both shameful and immoral.
They have been wrong-footed by a rival trumpeting like a raging bull elephant, trampling through all the mealy-mouthed political conventions that have bored and disenchanted a significant section of the Republican electorate. They might very well like to follow Trump’s racist lead and win back some of his voters, but they are afraid. Established US politicians keep their real feelings to themselves while peddling bland promises and assurances.
There is, however, one thing which all Trump’s rivals agree with him on and that is visceral resistance to President Obama’s mild attempt to tighten up conditions that need to be fulfilled before someone in the US can buy a gun. The daily slaughter from legally held weapons is not seen as unacceptable to Republicans. They mimic the morally vacuous protest of the powerful National Rifle Association which is that it is not the gun that is responsible for killing someone but the person holding it.
Interestingly, Trump’s rivals have made a far bigger fuss than he about Obama’s timorous plans for changes in US gun laws. In Trump’s eyes Obama is already politically dead. He does nothing to discourage his supporters’ conviction that America’s first black president was not in fact born in the US and is a secret Muslim.
It remains very hard to believe that this political monster has a very good chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination and harder still to think that he could win the White House in November. Trump represents the dark side of America, the ignorant, blundering section of the electorate that once cheered George W Bush, arguably one of the country’s least intelligent presidents. Bush became an embarrassment. President Donald Trump would be that and more - he would also be a tragedy.
