Trump is the best thing the Republicans have to offer—and that’s not much

By SJ Otto

As a life-long Donald Trump hater I find myself cheering for him in the latest round of Republican Party debates. While the things he says are not what I really want to hear, he is telling it like it is and not sugar coating it.

The GOP is the home of the angry white guy. Am I supposed to believe that any of those other candidates are any less sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Donald Trump? Am I supposed to believe that the other Republican candidates are any more sympathetic to the plight of illegal aliens than Trump? The answer is obvious. I really don’t think that keeping Muslims from coming into the country will actually happen even if Trump gets elected president. And for the same reasons I don’t really believe we will see a wall built along the Mexican borders- nor will all illegal aliens really be sent packing. But not because I don’t take Trump seriously, but because those ideas are so impractical they simply won’t get done.
“Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency. That’s not going to happen,” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said at the debate last night, provoking loud cheers from the audience. This quote was from Yahoo Politics. Trump, the current frontrunner, has repeatedly attacked Bush, taunting him as “low energy.” Bush fired back on stage at the Venetian casino describing Trump as an unserious “chaos candidate.”
A lot of mainstream journalists, pundits and the political machine of the Republican Party have tried to paint Trump as an “unserious” candidate. But the American public seems to take Trump very seriously. While the rest of the candidates condemned Trump’s anti-Muslim comments, his poll numbers went up. This morning a commentator on one of the news channels said Republicans may have to accept the idea that Trump may actually win the nomination.

And how seriously should we take the other candidates? The Republicans have had a steady diet of Tea Party candidates entrenching themselves throughout the party. They have moved the party to the far-far-far-far right. Last night a Facebook friend commented that the candidates seemed to focus on hate, war mongering, alienation, and xenophobia. However she was reminded that the debate format was mainly foreign affairs.  All this week journalist have been reporting that Ted Cruz has moved up in the polls. He is just another far-far-far-far right Republican. For those of us on the left of the far-far-far-far right agenda the guy is a real slime ball. He’s slick, he’s polished and he is likely even more right-wing than Trump.

For those of us on the left, the best thing about Trump is that he is not as bad as the other candidates. If we have to have a Republican in the White house he is the least destructive looking candidate. He also has a kind of populace streak in him that is attracting might-be voters. That should be a major slogan of the Republican candidates; “It could be worse.”  But for many of us it is hard to imagine how.

One thing many of us saw last night was the typical war mongering we usually hear from Republicans. A typical and predictable comment by Bush was; “We need to increase our military spending. We need to deal with the no-fly zone in Syria, a safe zone, we need to focus on building a military that is second to none, so that we can destroy Islamic terrorism.”

All of this is the opposite of what we really need or want, which is a disengagement from the Middle-east wars. They are a continuation of our policies of imperialism and that is one policy we need to end.