Trump is a Buffoon, but What Do We Call His Copycat Rivals?

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

Trump is a Buffoon, but What Do We Call His Copycat Rivals?

Donnie Trump is said to be the biggest thing in American politics these days. Of course, that's mostly being said by him – then repeated ad nauseum by a media gone ga-ga over his summer of self-worship.

In essence, Trump is nothing but a figment of his own imagination (and his presidential candidacy is even less substantial than a figment). As columnist Maureen Dowd notes, his campaign is like a "runaway Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon." In fact, that image pretty well sums up The Donald: A huge plastic, cartoonish balloon bloated with gaseous ego and floating precariously above us.

The danger of Donnie, however, is not that he'll get elected, but that his racist, nativist, xenophobic nonsense is giving permission for others to spout the same ugliness in public, and for other candidates to adopt some of his ugliest policies. For instance, by mindlessly and repeatedly asserting that immigrants from Mexico are rapists and murderers, the narcissistic TV celebrity has pushed this dehumanizing and dangerous stereotype from the darkest fringe of paranoiac politics directly into the Republican race for president.

Moreover, Trump has turned this vile bias into a vile proposal to revoke "birthright citizenship" – which is our Constitution's guarantee that children born here are citizens. This smug son of privilege wants to take that basic right away from the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Such rank political exploitation of children should be scorned and rejected as unAmerican, but instead it's being embraced, not only by far-out GOP wannabes like Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal, but also by some supposedly "serious" candidates, including Scott Walker and even Jeb Bush.

Trump seems proud to be a buffoonish know-nothing, but his pusillanimous copycat rivals clearly have no pride at all.

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

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Image from Donkey Hotey on Flickr.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.