Trumpeting for votes

An awfully successful real estate mogul, an outrageously prosperous business magnate, a terribly popular TV host, a filthily rich golf enthusiast worth $4.5 billion, an unsavoury bigoted racist politician, and an offensively foul-mouthed orator - this is hardly the résumé of a typical president of the USA. But, Donald, incessantly blowing his 'Trump'-et, has managed to claim pole position, and sustainably so, for the Grand Old (Republican) Party nomination for the 2016 polls.

If the strategy of the 69-year old New Yorker (described as 'irresponsible' and 'ignorant' by even neighbouring Canada's Prime MinisterJustin Trudeau following his Muslim tirade) is to give the opposition the advantage, the Democrats could not have done any better.

From the very beginning of his acerbic campaign, to draw support of his Republican partisans, Donald Trump has tried to advocate parochialism, which is selling well in the opinion polls.

Early last June, Trump slurred Mexicans by planning to build a wall, paid by the Mexicans, to separate the US from its neighbours, because he considered all Mexican immigrants - legal and illegal, criminals and rapists. Trumpssontambiéninmigrantes!

Busy as he remains with his empire stretching up to Dubai (oops! a billboard has been brought down), Trump has no idea that the US-Mexico border is 3,145 km (1,954 miles). Given the more important obligations of the president, Trump, if nominated (God forbid), and if elected (OMG), will need more than two terms to build the wall. At the rate of the 13,170-mile long Great Wall, Trump's 'barrier of seclusion'(preventing almost 250,000 legal crossings annually) would take almost three hundred years, and he would definitely need Mexican workers. I hope he does not live that long.

Trump is on record calling his presidential competitors losers and stupid. He is so much of both that in this time and age, he believes Saudi Arabia wouldn't exist without the US. And his idea of world economics is limited to his understanding that Americans can't get jobs 'because China has their jobs'.

Despite being an aspirant to lead a democracy in America, Trump easily reminds you of some of the most despotic rulers, who granted the opportunity, would probably propose to name his country TSA, the Trump States of America in line with his Trump Tower, Trump Palace, Trump Plaza, the Trump World Tower, Trump Golf clubs, Trump hotels, Trump restaurants, Trump ice rinks, Trump (TV) Productions, Trump… The world could be overtrumped.

Early this December, after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, Trump panicked (a US president cannot do that) and demanded that all Muslims be barred from entering his country until the nation's leaders can "figure out what is going on". In his state of apparent lunacy, Trump overlooked the almost three million Muslims resident in the USA, and did not outline any deportation policy for them.

This shocking rhetoric came after his November salvo, following the Paris attacks that killed 130 people, when he called for creating a database to track Muslims in America. Two months earlier Trump had declared that he loves Muslims.

His public rantings are targeted towards buoying opinion polls, and he has succeeded each time. "Mr. Trump has a track record of making surprising and even extreme comments whenever he is overtaken in opinion polls by other Republican candidates." His bombasts against every minority, wild as they may be, has drawn support from his party enthusiasts. There lies the danger to an America that has by and large embraced people of all colours since the post-Lincoln era. But now, "Anything brown, flush them down", chant the Trump fanatics. About banning Muslims, if at all practicable, the country would have to change its Constitution because the US has never discriminated immigrants by religion. The Supreme Court too would stand against Trump's proposal because it is "an overly restrictive immigration policy under the equal protection clause of the 14thAmendment".

Thankfully, there is a future. Politicians of opposite ideals and different religious groups were quick to reject Trump's anti-Muslim remarks. His Republican rival, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush termed Trump as a person "unhinged" (read deranged). "Reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive", was how Hillary Clinton summed up Trump's bizarre idea, denounced by groups representing Jews, Christians, Muslims and other convictions as well as civil rights advocates.

Eboo Patel, President of Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, said, "I'm standing in a building right now where I am looking up at the (108-storied) Sears Tower, which was designed by Fazlur Rahman Khan," a structural engineer born and educated in Bangladesh, and a Muslim. You could name a thousand other immigrants who shaped what today is the US of A, and the world.

Why does Trump go about doing his business (err politics) like so? He has not built his worldwide, including Muslim Middle East, empire on sheer foolishness. No one asked, which goes to show no one gives a **** for his theatrics, but I shall volunteer.

Being the entrepreneur he is, Trump has done his homework. He has seen the rise of polarisation along religious lines in India, and how Democrat Obama's tea-mate Narendra Modi benefited. He studied the growing popularity of Marine Le Pen's xenophobic Nationalist Front in France. He observed how Suu Kyi remained quiet to woo mainstream voters despite systemic violence and persecution against minority Rohingyas in Myanmar. Trump devised that to win he must gather the support of those who will be untied in division.

The writer is a practising Architect at BashaBari Ltd., a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fellow, a Baden-Powell Fellow Scout Leader, and a Major Donor Rotarian.