It may be a stretch, but people need to take Donald Trump seriously. The leading Republican contender for the presidential ticket is not a joke. The fact that he makes himself look and sound ridiculous in the eyes of most thinking observers should not be allowed to obscure the reality that, in just over one year, it is perfectly possible that this man could be in the White House. Trump started off as a populist politician with the simplistic message that just he had made himself a billionaire through his business dealings, he could make Americans rich again too. Apparently gauche, with a mouth that all too often ran away with him, Trump caught the attention of Middle America by launching attacks on liberal Political Correctness. He did not in fact put his finger on the excess of the PC lobby, which is that it has lost its liberal values by becoming utterly intolerant of anyone who does not kowtow to its received wisdom. But he nevertheless made people catch their breath with comments about ugly women and disabled reporters. Indeed, his very outrageousness has caused people to sit up and take notice. But his apparent fearlessness conceals a profound ignorance. His carte blanche condemnation of immigrants and his vow to send home the millions who are in the United States illegally entirely overlooks the historic reality that America is a land built on immigration. Trump says immigrants do not understand US civilization. He vigorously backs deplorable moves in Congress to stop the Obama administration from accepting Syrian refugees. He does not appear to know or foolishly does not care that one of the archetypical US products owned worldwide, the Apple computers, phones and tablets, were created by the son of Syrian migrants, Steve Jobs. But now Trump has excelled himself in his boorish, oafish pronouncements. He has called for all Muslims to be stopped from traveling to the US. This is a barely credible and deeply sinister idea. He is suggesting that absolutely every Muslim, be they businessmen and women, tourists, diplomats, students or people seeking healthcare or even US servicemen who are Muslims who have been serving their country abroad, should immediately be barred "while we work out what is going on in the Muslim world" What is going on in the Muslim world Mr Trump is instability and conflict caused in no small measure by your country's ill-informed and catastrophic interference in Iraq under President George W. Bush and the failure of his successor Barack Obama to act against the bloody Assad regime. What is also going on is the offensive and purblind insistence that all Muslims are terrorists and are, therefore, the enemy. What will this man say next? The logic of his chilling words is that American Muslims should themselves be thrown out of the country they love and revere. The San Bernardino gun rampage by a clearly demented couple is being used by this would-be president as clear proof that all Muslims constitute an enemy in the midst of the United States. Trump of course makes no mention of non-Muslim US killers who regularly rampage with high-powered assault weapons, slaughtering innocents, including children. One of his rivals for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush, has condemned Trump's Islamophobia and called him "unhinged". That is far too kind a description of this dangerous man.
