Among the volley of lies spit out of the coarse mouth of Donald Trump on a daily basis is his claim that he’s leading Hillary Clinton in the general election matchup for president. “I beat Hillary in many of the polls that have been taken, and each week I get better and better,” he said earlier this month.
Nope, not even close. The Bloomberg Poll that came out on Wednesday had Clinton besting Trump, 54 percent to 36. The Wall Street Journal survey had Clinton up by 13. She leads by 10 in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And she’s up 11.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of all the polls. With each passing week he actually does much worse.
So, rest assured, yes? At the least, our country won’t be in the undersize hands of a crazed narcissist. I wish. What keeps millions of people up at night is the one-trick pony that Trump could ride all the way into the White House: fear. If enough Americans cower in hysteria, Trump might be able to pull this thing off.
Without a filter of decency or a shred of diplomacy, Trump gloated about how the latest mass murder by the Islamic State barbarians helped him. Most political leaders at least expressed sorrow and mourning for the loss of 31 lives in Brussels on Tuesday. Trump called the city “a total disaster,” and said the fear cast by Islamic State terror “is probably why I’m No. 1 in the polls.”
Let’s pause to behold a rare Trump acknowledgment of a bit of truthiness: The more people who are murdered by the savages from the Islamic State, the better it is for him. The Islamic State is a gift to Trump. And he is a gift to them, playing into the grand scheme of the killers. He would make the world far less safe, and bring the Islamic State closer to the global clash of worlds that those monsters desire.
If you listen to Trump’s analysis of how he became the Republican front-runner, you hear a grateful appreciation of how terror has helped him. Speaking earlier this month, he talked about how his unfathomable candidacy took off last year. The Mexican-bashing, the call for a wall, the broad xenophobia and celebrity trash talk — it was all working. But then, “something happened called Paris,” he said, his voice lowering to a hush.
Paris — the slaughter of 130 people in November. In Trump’s telling, it was a wonderful turning point for him. “Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster,” he said. “And what happened with me is this whole run took on a whole new meaning.”
From there, he lumped Paris, the Mexican border and the Syrian refugee crisis in one big rancid stew of fear. He ran dark and spooky television ads, including some in Arizona last week, showing Islamic terrorists, a picture of the Moroccan border that was supposed to be Mexico, and his promise to build the wall.
In the wake of Brussels, he again said the United States should “close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on” and ramp up the torture of terror suspects. His main threat to the nomination, the execrable Ted Cruz, followed Trump’s lead, calling for a police state in which the authorities would “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods in the United States.
Having dragged the presidential debate down to the most deplorable and unworkable ideas, the two Republicans then went deeper into the gutter, insulting each other’s wives. (Trump wants you to know that Melania, his third spouse, is way hotter.)
It gets tedious reminding people that Trump’s ideas on how to stop terror have nothing to do with the problem, but let’s give it another go. The Paris killers are not — repeat, not — Syrian refugees. Nor are they from Mexico. They are Belgian and French citizens, criminals and thugs, radicalized in the festering tenements of Brussels.
The biggest wall in the world cannot prevent hatred from taking over a malleable mind, aided by Internet poison. As for torture, numerous military experts have concluded that it yields little useful information, and of course violates international conventions signed by the United States.
“I think his ideas are preposterous,” said Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security director and a Republican. What’s needed is far better police work — particularly in the bureaucratically dysfunctional city of Brussels — and encouraging people within Muslim communities to expose the militants in their midst.
Trump says Muslims are not cooperating, in places like England. British authorities say otherwise. “This is absolutely not the case,” the interior minister, Theresa May, told Parliament this week. “He is just plain wrong.”
When something awful happens, the occasion calls for the Good Guys to strike the right tone — the political theater that Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt mastered. President Obama, preoccupied in Cuba, missed his moment on this latest horror.
But the Republican front-runner exposed himself, again, as someone who is monumentally ill prepared to be commander in chief. He listens only to himself, as he said this month, and what his gut tells him is that his only path to the White House is to do everything he can to make people feel very afraid.
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TIMOTHY EGAN>
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