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Fun’s Over With Trump

When populism turns into hooliganism, it is a threat to democracy
trump cruz

I watched several times the entire NSFW 1:53 clip of Trump calling Ted Cruz a p**sy for having constitutional qualms about waterboarding. It doesn’t get any better when repeated. The thing that most people are talking about is his use of the vulgarity, which is pretty lowlife stuff coming from a man who wants to sit in the Oval Office. But by far the more disturbing thing was that he was calling Cruz this as a way of asserting his own willingness to torture people, and the Constitution be damned.

And here’s the thing: a mob in the audience started shouting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Cheering for torture, and this ridiculous man calling a U.S. Senator a p**sy for not being man enough to say to hell with the Constitution, we’re going to torture.

I’ve enjoyed the Trump show. I’ve enjoyed the way he’s shaken up the Republican Party, frazzled Conservatism, Inc., and put the state of the beleaguered white working class into the political conversation. I liked him when he was a threat to established interests. But now that he’s coming off as a threat to democracy, this isn’t funny anymore.

This guy is a hooligan. A man who talks like a mafioso while bragging about his lack of compunction for Constitutional niceties is not someone a democracy can afford to have head the executive branch of the US Government.  I believe that when it gets right down to it, most Americans will be unwilling to take a risk on a president with that kind of character. There’s something of the back alley to him. If America needs to shred the Constitution and embrace torture with gusto to “be great again,” then she will already be ruined.

 

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