While visiting my parents the other day I took note of their well-stocked larder.
“If Donald Trump gets elected and I see mushroom clouds 50 kilometres to the southeast, I will be here in three hours,” I told Mom.
Living precisely 50 kilometres from the nearest first-strike target, a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silo, means this comment was only 90 per cent a joke.
I’m not the only one who seems to think this way. On February 16 President Barack Obama said, “I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president, and the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I think they recognize that being president is a serious job. It's not hosting a talk show or a reality show. It's not promotion. It's not marketing. It's hard….
“And these are the folks I have faith in. Because they're ultimately going to say, whoever's standing where I'm standing right now has the nuclear codes with them and can order 21-year-olds into a firefight and have to make sure that the banking system doesn't collapse — and is often responsible for not just the United States of America, but 20 other countries that are having big problems or are falling apart and will be looking for us to do something.”
Yet, amazingly, Mr. You’re Fired is steamrolling through the Republican primaries. And that’s scary.
I came across a video the other day of Trump talking about somehow forcing Mexico to build a wall along its northern border, ostensibly to keep all those undesirables out of America.
Trump said, “So the president of Mexico yesterday – or the ex-president or whatever, whoever, who cares – he said, ‘We will not even consider paying for the wall.’
“You have to understand, because, okay, you ready, who’s going to pay for the wall? Mexico! Who? Mexico! A 100 per cent. A 100 per cent.
“So I get a call from one of the reporters yesterday, and they said, ‘The president of Mexico said they will not, under any circumstances pay for the wall.’
“They said to me, ‘What is your comment?’
“I said, ‘The wall just got 10 feet higher.’ It’s true, it’s true.”
This is what the Republican Party has come to?
I can think of another Republican president, one who also had a thing or two to say about walls. While the entire speech is worth a read, the key part is this: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
That was Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Two years later, the Berlin Wall was gone.
Perhaps the only president in the 20th century more deserving of addition to Mount Rushmore might be Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reagan essentially won the Cold War, calling for freedom and the tearing down of walls. Now Trump wants to build them.
There’s one more thing about Trump. If you were to substitute the words “Mexican” or “Islamic” with the word “Jew” in any of his speeches, how close would they sound like Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s?
Don’t forget, Hitler was elected in 1933. With fearsome power he had at his disposal, he unleashed a world war. Now imagine him being entrusted with the nuclear codes…
I hope I don’t have to raid my parent’s larder anytime soon.
