Donald Trump needs help. Not just help with all those pesky policy details that he can’t seem to master; not even help with a coherent political strategy for winning in November. He needs psychological help and he needs it now.
His unhinged reaction to the Orlando mass murders sends a clear message to his party and to voters in general: This presidential thing isn’t working out well for him or the nation.
At first, it was all too easy to dismiss his histrionics. His conspiracy theories about United States President Barack Obama’s birth certificate were just a desperate cry for attention: An appeal to the fringes that made him the butt of all jokes. Then, after he gained political traction, the conventional wisdom was that the hype was just one big theatrical act: A marketing wheeze that would end with defeat in the crowded Republican primaries.
But of course the wild accusations, irrational behaviour and self-engrossed eruptions didn’t end there. Now, at a time of national mourning, the Republican presidential nominee has accused the 44th President of the US of sympathising with terrorists.
“He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other”, Trump told Fox News Channel’s morning show. “We’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or he’s got something else in mind”, he added, for good measure. “And the something else in mind, you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot — they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism. There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable”.
This is no random thought. He took the same line to NBC’s Today show, saying: “Well, there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it”. Just to be clear: We’re talking about the same president who ordered the commando raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the civilised world’s greatest enemy.
That’s the same president who has ordered more than 10 times the number of drone strikes than his predecessor, killing more than 3,000 suspected terrorists and several hundred more civilians, according to the best estimates. If Obama is a secret sympathiser with America-hating terrorists, he is a supremely bad one. It is long past time for his puppet-masters to pull the right strings and get their rogue operative back in line with their true mission of radical terrorism.
It was bad enough that Trump’s obsession after Orlando was to retreat to his only true area of expertise: Himself. “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism”, he tweeted on Sunday.
By Monday morning, a normal candidate might have dialed back this vomit-inducing self-congratulation in favour of some national healing and tough words about terrorism. Naturally that wasn’t the choice of the real estate developer. “No, no, no. I’m getting thousands of letters and tweets that I was right about the whole situation”, he told Fox News. “I mean, I’ve been right about a lot of things, frankly.”
This might be mildly humorous if the reality TV star wasn’t asking to take control of the world’s most powerful military force and its nuclear arsenal. Instead, we have a Republican nominee who is proud of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US after a terrorist attack by a US citizen who would never be subject to that ban. As Spock once told Captain Kirk: “Insufficient facts always invite danger.”
The appeal of this flawed logic is known to the Hillary Clinton campaign. In the wake of the Republican sweep of the mid-term elections in 2002, Bill Clinton famously observed that the incoherence of the politics didn’t much matter to voters. “When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong, than someone who’s weak and right”,Bill Clinton said.
The challenge for Hillary is to be strong and right, especially at a time when her rival is so far out of the mainstream. Trump’s brand of deranged politics should come as no surprise to his enablers. There’s a direct line between the birth certificate insanity and where the Republican finds itself today. And that line points to a moral and political gutter that the party will find it hard to crawl out of.
After the 9/11 attacks, the then US president George W. Bush had warned the world that they were “either with us or against us in the fight against terror”. To his never-ending credit, Bush also insisted that Islam was a religion of peace and that Muslim Americans were friends and fellow citizens who deserved our respect.
Today, the Republican party must decide whether it supports sane leadership or opposes it. In the fight against terror, is it with the commander-in-chief or a delusional conspiracy theorist?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist, as well as chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty.
