Gage Skidmore, Flickr CC
It’s been fascinating to watch how national political reporters write about blowhard billionaire Donald Trump’s outrageous political views compared with how they treat other Republican candidates with remarkably similar views they clearly consider more legitimate presidential contenders.
The media have no problem ripping apart Trump’s bombastic, simple-minded, racist attacks on immigration that have won him more Republican support than any other candidate in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.
But why do they let all the other Republican candidates off the hook when the difference between their views on immigration and Trump’s are, in most cases, almost infinitesimal?
That becomes more obvious every time Trump tosses out another irrational proposal off the top of his head to shut down immigration of Latinos into this country. Most of the non-Trump Republicans, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, scramble to second the crazy guy and portray themselves as just as viciously anti-immigration as he is.
Trump’s latest outrage would gut the U.S. Constitution of what historically was one of the Republican Party’s greatest achievements passed in 1868 following the Civil War and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
Trump wants to eliminate “birthright citizenship,” the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of U.S. citizenship for anyone born in this country regardless of the citizenship, race, religion or national origin of their parents.
It is one of those extraordinary principles of American democracy that really does make the U.S. “exceptional” in the world, as so many on the far right love to boast.
The original purpose of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship rights to African American children of slaves who previously had no rights at all. Throughout our nation’s history ever since, it has been a powerful legal force behind the promise of equality and equal protection under the law for every American.
Because birthright citizenship has become one of our nation’s fundamental principles, it’s appalling how many of the supposedly legitimate Republican candidates rushed to embrace Trump’s ugly idea of ending citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants.
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With much double-talking and backtracking, Republican candidates who expressed support for Trump’s obnoxious idea included governors Walker, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and John Kasich; senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham; former Sen. Rick Santorum and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Walker twisted himself into granny knots, taking three different positions on birthright citizenship within a single week.
Walker originally told NBC, “Yes, absolutely, going forward” we should end birthright citizenship, then told CNBC “I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other” and, this just in, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos over the weekend he now opposes repealing birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, who knows?
Courting GOP Extremists
Among Republicans, you also can count on someone saying something so bizarre even Trump seems almost rational. Ben Carson, the tea party’s favorite African American, topped the field by seriously proposing sending drones to the Mexican border to target caves used by drug smugglers, adding the deadly weapons of warfare to border problems that previously have been limited to politicians merely shooting off their mouths.
The point is almost all of the non-Trump Republicans seeking the presidential nomination are perfectly willing to support ridiculous, un-American proposals against immigration to attract support from radical Republican extremists who vote heavily in their party primaries.
What makes any of those candidates any more legitimate or acceptable as potential presidents than a billionaire TV celebrity clown like Donald Trump? Yet the national press keeps assuring us Trump can never actually win the Republican nomination. A more legitimate party nominee will emerge, they promise.
But, seriously, where are any more legitimate candidates in that frantically jockeying mob of Trump and the pseudo-Trumps?
We in Wisconsin already can tell that very few national reporters have a clue just how far to the right Walker really is. We know this because they keep telling us Walker is merely “veering to the right” to attract voters in Iowa.
But there aren’t any Iowa voters in Wisconsin. And we know there isn’t a hair’s width of space left for Walker to move any farther to the right than he already has here, rolling back decades of democratic rights and legal protections.
This is a man who doesn’t believe any woman has a right to end a pregnancy even if she’s 10 years old, the traumatized victim of rape or incest or to save her own life.
Walker says right out loud we should not only shut down illegal immigration, but legal immigration as well. And that there are only a “handful of reasonable, moderate followers of Islam” among more than 1.6 billion followers of the world’s second largest religion.
Trump is an outrageous, racist candidate, all right.
But so are all those non-Trump Republicans who continue to push their party toward racial division and hatred of immigration, instead of embracing America as the nation of immigrants we’ve always been, promising equal opportunity and human rights for all who come.
