While I’m more than willing to accept that Donald Trump will be our next president, it comes with a dose of skepticism only because of the company he seems to be attracting.
On the one hand are political lifers, on the other are those with extreme ideologies.
As the populist candidate, Trump won widespread support by pledging to “drain the swamp” of the Capitol Hill establishment.
To date, he’s dug deeper into the muck and pulled out political has-beens and fellow septuagenarians Rudoph Guliani, former mayor of New York, and Newt Gingrich, disgraced congressman.
Guliani raises two red flags. As mayor of NYC he approved “stop and frisk” measures used by its police department that targeted to a large degree blacks and Latinos. Second, his current business ties in Russia and the Middle East are deep and tangled, creating a conflict of interest if he has the president’s ear.
Gingrich, mastermind of two government shutdowns for the longest period in U.S. history (28 days), continues to be obstructionist and delights in chaos. If he were secretary of state diplomacy would be turned on its ear.
It’s of even less comfort to know Steve Bannon, a racist xenophobe, and Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, are in Trump’s clique. Kobach, as we all too well know, has it in for immigrants.
As for Bannon, his anti-establishment ideology is downright frightening.
“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon said in a 2014 conversation with a writer from The Daily Beast. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
The reason these people are important is because the job of being president is way too big for one person to handle alone. By necessity, Trump will have to rely on their advice. So when Kobach suggests a national registry for all Muslims, that’s scary stuff. That comment segued into the suggestion of internment camps — America’s shameful imprisonment of innocent immigrants during World War II.
I AM LOATH to believe that the majority of those who voted for Trump believed such extremism would be allowed to come to fruition. Perhaps in their zeal to upset the apple cart, they gave Trump a pass for his “birther” movement against President Obama as nothing more than a sick publicity stunt. Meanwhile, that “stunt” has invited other deviants in the door who are determined to turn the United States into a hateful, fearmongering place to live.
Are we really going to deport 11 million Hispanics living and working in the United States? Think of the damage to our social fabric if hundreds of thousands of parents are separated from their children. And more practically, think of the toll that will take on the many industries that depend on immigrant labor.
To those who are Muslim, many who have lived in the United States for generations, think of the terror of being a walking target. Would you dare go to prayers at your local mosque?
Remember the 2014 shootings in Kansas City where a proclaimed Neo-Nazi opened fire on who he supposed were Jews, killing a grandfather and grandson and a woman — all Christians.
