Just when you thought it was bad enough he upset Filipinos worldwide–including the 4 million Asian Americans of Filipino descent in the U.S.–Donald Trump couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Or maybe to erase the memory of denigrating all Filipinos as terrorists in a previous news cycle, Trump felt he had to come up with a brand new inanity.
What else could he do but hurl yet another slur. First against Hillary Clinton, then President Obama. If you haven’t heard, Trump thinks a veiled threat of assassination is just fun and games in the realm of politics.
But like kidding with a TSA screener about how you’re carrying a big bomb between your legs, it’s best not done; especially if you want to set a good example as the potential leader of the free world.
Trump continues to give us a preview of what the political horror show known as a Trump presidency might look like. Instead of inspiring confidence, he’s letting us know that one of his chief attributes is his alarming recklessness.
It came up during a stump speech in North Carolina on Tuesday, when he speculated about how to stop Hillary Clinton from making SCOTUS appointments who would be tough on gun laws.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said, according to a report in The New York Times. “Although the Second Amendment people–maybe there is, I don’t know.”
We all know Trump wasn’t really thinking about someone doing extensive lobbying, or anything like that. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Trump’s statement was what you might call a “double-gun-tendre.”
Why talk specifically about the NRA or something real (like the coincidental major donation he just got from the NRA) when he can be ambiguous and have it both ways. Trump dominates the news and keeps people guessing. He drives his loving anti-Clinton base wild, but his critics wilder.
And it leaves the rest of us wondering if he has what it takes to lead our country.
For someone who wants his name to exude elite luxury, Trump’s political brand has come to be known as base, coarse, and covered in mud.
In a word, ugly.
The Trump gun comments were followed with yet another rhetorical missile aimed at President Obama, whom Trump called the “founder of ISIS.”
Really.
Of course, what would you expect from Trump, the man who spent much of the Obama years wrongfully claiming the validity of the president’s U.S. birth certificate. Trump was just dead wrong. But that hasn’t stopped him from aspiring to the highest office in the land.
Now Trump is making a mockery of his ISIS statements about Obama, saying that his comments were “sarcasm.”
Joke lang? Like his candidacy.
Trump sarcastic about PH too?
All this after last week’s stunning remarks, when Trump warned that immigrants, including those from the Philippines, represent a pool of recruitment for Islamist terror groups and should be vetted heavily before allowed into the U.S.
It provoked one Philippine legislator to propose that Trump be permanently banned from entering the Philippines.
According to a Philippine law dating back to 2001, the country’s Bureau of Immigration and Deportation can exclude or deny entry to the country anyone who has shown disrespect to the Filipino people.
Congressman Jose Salceda’s Resolution 143 criticized Trump and said The Donald should be “banned for being inimical” to the Philippines’ “national interest.”
Salceda in his resolution: “There is no feasible interest or reasonable justification to the wholesale labeling of Filipinos as coming from a terrorist state.”
Salceda said the remarks have “aggravated the shame” on Filipinos, Filipino Muslims, including Filipino migrants and overseas workers.
Salceda called Trump’s remarks “unprompted and undeserved,” typical of the “unrepentantly negative, dysfunctionally nativist, aggressively adversarial attitude towards immigrants in the USA where he aspires to be the leader, and thus could be in position to influence policies affecting” the second largest group of Asian Americans in the U.S.
Add to that the long history of the Philippines as a former colony and as a small but important ally during the Gulf War, and Trump’s harsh comments sound downright ignorant.
But Trump just doesn’t seem to care about us. And why should he care about anything, so long as the money flow from the Philippines doesn’t stop.
Trump’s already building his brand in the Philippines and has licensed his name to a new Trump Tower in the Makati business section of Manila. The property is more than 94 percent pre-sold.
It’s hard to imagine how Filipinos would take to living in a high-rise building named after such a newly tagged low-rise villain.
Then again, the country is currently rehabbing the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who raped and pillaged the Philippines far worse than candidate Trump.
But at least Marcos was Filipino.
Trump would have to show up at a Filipino barrio fiesta like the ones in Stockton and San Francisco this weekend, dressed in one of those see-through-shirts (Barong Tagalog) and subjecting his ankles to the bamboo pole dance (the Tinikling) with his yellow-orange hair flopping all around.
Even then, for most Filipinos, that still wouldn’t be penance enough for the inflammatory comments he’s made.
Trump’s not walking back those statements. So those Filipino ones are real. The others about Clinton and Obama are jokes.
Sorry, Philippines. America, the original model and installers of your form of government has gone mad. You are on your own to imagine and realize any kind of governance you can manage.
That’s what this this presidential campaign hath wrought. Through his outlandish candidacy, Donald Trump is on the verge of making a mockery of U.S. democracy.
Veteran journalist and commentator Emil Guillermo writes on politics and society and is based in Northern California. Contact: http://www.twitter.com/emilamok
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