The Trump Phenomenon: a cancer on the body politic

Grow up.

That's the advice Roger Ailes has for Donald Trump. That's the advise the venerable Thomas Sowell has for him as well.

That's the advice his mommy should have given him long ago.

Donald Trump is a petulant, thin-skinned bully, a braggart without nearly the substance to back up his bragging he would like us to think he has. He's full of promises, but pretty much wholly without any clue as to how to accomplish what he promises.

Ask him for specifics, and he'll change the subject. Refuse to let him get away with that- hold his feet to the fire- and he'll respond by personally attacking you.

He is not a serious candidate for the presidency. He is absolutely unqualified in terms of experience, knowledge, temperament and personal maturity. He says that his supporters would still be in back of him if he committed murder. And the hell of it is, he's probably right.

He does not attract supporters who are looking for a president. He attracts supporters who are looking for validation for their own darker selves, He tells people what they want to hear. If they wanted to hear something else, that would be what he would tell them. He is a clown, a buffoon, a joke. He will not be president; the American people as a whole will not allow it. They have too much sense. But he has attracted a substantial following of people who are angry at politicians and at the system and in some cases at the world. He is a mouthpiece for anger.

Which is fine. There is nothing wrong with expressing anger. But he doesn't channel it into change or into solutions. He simply thrives on it like a kind of emotional vampire, existing on the dark and destructive parts of us without contributing anything to making our lives or our common experience better.

He is a malignancy, an abnormality, that has grown the way cancer grows: at the expense of what is healthy and wholesome.  Tomorrow night he will distract probably a plurality of the people of Iowa from the job of selecting a president with no better excuse than providing an ego trip for himself.

He will not be president. Someone else will be. But he may very well distort the process of selecting that someone else enough that we wind up with the wrong someone. Like all cancers, he disrupts the healthy processes of the body and prevents them from functioning as they are designed to function.

I fear that the chemotherapy of common sense will not begin here in Iowa. It may not happen in New Hampshire, either, or in South Carolina. But somewhere along the line, the common sense of the American people will reassert itself. It may be in the later primaries; we may yet get a healthy and wise Republican presidential nominee to return the body to the ways of health. Or cancer may have to be burned out of the body politic by the painful and destructive radiation of another four years of radical Democratic misrule.

But Donald Trump will not be president. Sooner or later cancer will be cured, and the body will live. Let us pray that it be sooner. May the body soon recover its health, and get on with the healthy and natural function of choosing someone to actually lead our nation instead of feeding his own ego.

Photo By DonkeyHotey via http://public-domain.pictures/