Trump Finally Reaches Limit of How Far Other GOP Candidates Will Follow Him

Some of the candidates, anyway.

Trump's latest outrage was bellowing a vow to ban ALL Muslims from entering the U.S. (So the rich Saudis and other Arab allies of the U.S. would be banned? And Muslim students the U.S. hopes to groom to be future agents of influence on behalf of U.S. Imperialism in their homelands? And Muslim business people? You can see why this finally crossed a line.) As usual, he “doubled down” (the media's term) on it when gently questioned about it by establishment “journalists.”

Most of the Republicans trying to be their party's candidate for president in 2016 criticized or denounced Trump's ridiculous threat, to various degrees.

However, three “candidates” in fact tacked in Trump's direction, saying they'd do something similar. They are the most extremely reactionary and irrational of the “candidates,” the Bomb-Thrower of the Senate, Ted Cruz, and two religious zealots, Mike Huckabee, a notorious purveyor of hate, and Rick Santorum (whose last name was converted on the Internet into an appropriate synonym for the froth of excrement and semen that drips out of rectums after anal sex). (Huckabee, on his radio show, described Occupy Movement members as “filthy,” using the language of dehumanization and disgust that opens the door to persecution and eventual murder of the targets of vituperation.)

All three poll under 1%. That is why I put “candidates” in quotes when referring to them. They aren't really candidates. Not “serious” ones. But the establishment propaganda system (aka “the” media) thinks otherwise. (Or pretends to, because one thing U.S. media always does is try and push people's minds as far to the right as they can and generate support for virtually any noxious, anti-human reactionary around.)

But actual candidates, with much more popular support, who run outside the two-party dictatorship, are routinely ignored by that same media, or given exiguous coverage. Nader, Greens, Socialists, Libertarians, and others are examples of this.

The reason the other GOP politicians lusting for the presidency denounced Trump was because they correctly calculated that the overtly racist, xenophobic, hysterically bigoted people Trump is aiming his dangerous demagogy at are too few in number to elect one of them president, and would be outnumbered by those revolted by pandering to such scum. So this isn't a matter of principle, as their boilerplate, pious “American values” rhetoric would have us believe.

It took a lot for the GOP pack (a plurality of it anyway) to finally stop Me-Too-ing Trump's vulgar, revolting demagogy. Remember, he started off this summer by proclaiming, in racist, nativist fashion that Mexican “illegal” immigrants were “rapists” and other riffraff, (but perhaps “some” were “good people,” he “supposed,” sounding ostentatiously dubious about it). He has made many outrageous statements since. Indeed, he has a decades-long history of racist behavior, not just statements, well documented in “alternative” media like the Village Voice.

Ben “Pinocchio” Carson actually started the Muslim-bashing phase of the campaign by stating that it would be unacceptable to have a Muslim president of the U.S. (But he said it in such a mild-mannered tone of voice that the reaction was muted. That's how he gets away with his outrageous shit. Saying it softly.)

Of course, outrage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I apply normal human morality to determining what is outrageous. But in the U.S., which is an extremely right-wing nation, with a power system that is fascist at its core, Bernard Sanders calling himself (falsely) a “democratic socialist” is more problematic to the elites (indeed barely tolerable) than candidates vowing to outlaw all abortions, or Carly Fiorina falsely insisting that an illegally made, surreptitious anti-Planned Parenthood video showed a live baby, kicking and bawling on a table, while PP personnel discussed harvesting its organs. Even after being very mildly confronted about this blatantly false statement by the right-wing TV “news” show host Chris Wallace (on Murdoch's Fox “News,” she shouted back at Wallace that she indeed had seen the (nonexistent) video, and Wallace backed down.

The worst part of all this is that the U.S. is globally dominant, and is by far the most powerful empire in history. So it empowers the most reactionary, vicious forces in numerous nations, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, and the ruining of the lives of hundreds of millions more. History in numerous countries would have proceeded on a far more benign path if not for the U.S.

Viewed from that perspective, it is a tragedy of world historic proportions that the natives of the Western Hemisphere didn't drive the European invaders into the sea several centuries ago.

One final note about Trump. Trump is, and has always been, a media creation. The media, first in New York City over decades, and now nationally, has always given him undeserved attention. The reasons for this are complex. It is NOT because he is some kind of master manipulator of the media. This is the “sophisticated” cop-out defense that media people and “analysts” give when they need to explain away the media's complicity with Trump, and is one of the excuses routinely trotted out in other instances to keep their own covert agendas and ideology under wraps. Why is Trump's every nasty utterance “newsworthy?” They keep saying he's “leading in the polls.” Well, he has the backing of around 30% of the 25% of the electorate that are registered Republicans. Sanders has 30% of the larger number who are Democrats. So Sanders actually has more people for him than Trump does. But compare the volume of coverage the two get. [One survey found that Trump got 28 times as much TV coverage as Sanders.}

Trump actually has the support of at most 8% of the electorate. The media let people mistakenly believe that it's 30%, by blaring that number and duping the credulous and unskeptical.(It's 30% of Republican primary voters, the most rabidly right-wing voters in the country.)

U.S. media always leans as far right as they can get away with without completely blowing their pretense of “objectivity.” If the excuse for their favoritism is that Trump gets (the media's) attention by being provocative, the obvious reputation to that argument is that Sanders certainly says things that are provocative. But his “provocations” are ideas that are anathema to the corporate oligarchy, ideas that they don't want people to be exposed to, such as universal single-payer health care. (Not that Sanders is actually great. He is a staunch supporter of U.S. militarism, and wants to imprison Edward Snowden, so I would be very reluctant to vote for him.)

Now there is some hand-wringing among elites over the possibility that Trump could actually be the GOP candidate, or even worse, President. Well, you all made your bed by building him up, so if that happens you'll just have to lie in it. (Unfortunately so will the rest of us, and not just in the U.S.)

Assholes.