It’s taken me a while to put my finger on exactly what political label best describes Republican Donald Trump as his presidential campaign snarls and spits to a finish. I think I’ve finally got it: Donald Trump is a “legal alien”.
That’s right, the man who has spent the last year railing against those dastardly “illegal aliens” supposedly wreaking havoc on the United States turns out to be a legal alien — someone born in America, but whose values are completely alien to all that has made America great.
Who do you know has denigrated immigrants, the handicapped, Muslims and Mexicans; trashed all of America’s recent trade agreements; mounted a fraudulent campaign claiming US President Barack Obama was not born in the country; insulted the whole presidential selection process by running for the highest office without doing a shred of homework; boasted of grabbing women; disparaged America’s Nato allies; praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and encouraged him to hack Democratic Party emails; vowed to prosecute his campaign rival, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, if he got elected; threatened to curb the freedom of the press; suggested that gun rights advocates might take the law into their own hands if Clinton won; insulted the parents of slain Iraq war hero, Humayun Khan; been accused by 11 women of sexual assault or other unwelcome physical advances; sought to undermine America’s electoral system by claiming, without a shred of evidence, that it is so “rigged” he can’t promise to concede if he loses; and been cited for lying about more things more times in more ways on more days than any presidential aspirant in history?
The big question now is, who are the rest of Americans?
1) The American people. Who are they? Hopefully, an overwhelming majority will crush Trump at the polls and send the message that he is the one who needs to be morally deported, with a pathway back to the American mainstream only if he changes his ways.
If Trump loses and decides to start a media company — a kind of “Trump Ink” — to keep injecting his conspiratorial venom into the veins of US politics and terrorise moderate Republicans, he will pay dearly. Trump Ink will blacken Trump Inc. Already there are myriad reports of people avoiding Trump hotels and golf courses, because of his poisonous behaviour. The PGA Tour recently moved its long-standing tournament from Trump’s Doral course in Miami to a course in ... Mexico!
2) The Republican Party. Whose party is it? Almost all of the GOP’s leaders have chosen to stand with Trump because they love their jobs (and the party that sustains them) more than their country. If Trump loses, will the GOP leadership try to chase that big chunk of its base that went with Trump and become an alt-right party, or will this GOP fracture and the decent conservatives go off and form a new, healthy Republican Party?
An overriding need
America desperately needs a healthy centre-right party that embraces the full rainbow of American society, promotes market-based solutions for climate change, celebrates risk-taking over redistribution, pushes for smaller government, expands trade that benefits the many but takes care of those hurt by it, invests in infrastructure, offers tax and entitlement reforms — and liberates itself from the right-wing thought police.
3) The Democratic Party. Whose party is it? In truth, Bernie Sanders’ movement fractured the Democratic Party almost as much as Trump did the GOP, but that fissure has been temporarily plastered over by the overriding need to defeat Trump.
If Clinton wins, that fissure will quickly reopen and some basic questions will have to be answered: Do Democrats support any trade expansion? Do Democrats believe in the principled use of force? Do they believe that America’s risk-takers who create jobs are a profit engine to be unleashed or a menace only to be regulated and taxed? Do they believe America needs to expand safety nets to catch those being left behind by this age of accelerating change, but also control entitlements so they will be sustainable?
Bottom line: America is in the middle of a massive technological shift. It’s changing every job, workplace and community. Government can help, but there is no quick fix, and a lot more will depend on what Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, calls “the startup of you”. You need a plan to succeed today.
To the extent that the centre-left and the centre-right can come together on programmes to help every American get the most out of this world and cushion the worst, all of America will be better off. But the more America gets tribally divided, the more the American dream will become an alien concept to all Americans.
— New York Times News Service
Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author
