Never Attack a Fellow Republican - Unless He's NOT a Fellow Republican

Ronald Reagan counseled Republicans not to attack our own people. I believe in that. Shoot your own side first is a terrible battle plan. So why am I picking on poor old Donald Trump, man of the people and voice of the downtrodden conservative?

Because he's no such thing!  This guy is not one of us! It takes precious little digging into his past to uncover things like his past donations to Hillary Clinton and to Bill Clinton back in the day. They attended his wedding for crying out loud and they weren't gate crashers. He supports a nationalized universal healthcare. He has shady business deals going back decades. As to his brilliance as a financial tycoon?  Bosh!  He's a silver spoon entrepreneur, having got his start with 300 million dollars his father left him. He's bankrupted 4 companies along the way, cost thousands their life savings and now wants to take a run at the US economy? And after 4 wives, you can hardly call him a "Family Values" candidate.

Trump enjoys golf with friends quite as much as Obama does.

We've got way better presidential choices out there with some actual depth of ideas and not just a loud angry voice. Trump's a one-hit wonder politically.  He appeals to the worst in us by categorically stating that President Trump will uproot eleven million illegal Mexicans in America and toss them back into the middle of the ongoing Mexican drug war going on south of the border. He plans to send them homeless, without food and broke, along with their children, without any support or personal assets to care for themselves back into a nation torn by violent clashes between the government and drug cartels. 

These wars are so violent that the El Paso city hall has pockmarks from stray machine gun fire from clashes between the Federales and drug cartel troops in Ciudad Juárez just across the border. People on our side of the border have been shot at, murdered and their homes vandalized. On their side of the border, the cartels leave human heads alongside the road as a warning to any who would oppose them.

Trump is advocating the creation of an epic humanitarian crisis in the country right next to us. Trump believes he can close the border successfully by suddenly putting eleven million desperate people on the other side of it - people who will want to come right back here for all the same reasons that they left Mexico in the first place. How many troops are we going to have to put on the border to stop the flood that will follow? 

Can you imagine what happens if 11 million people rush our Southern border all at once? Is Trump planning to mow them down with machine guns and drones; maybe some napalm? The man's advocating something far worse than what we did to my Cherokee ancestors with the Trail of Tears. He's all show, appealing to the worst prejudices in all of us and giving angry people what they want to hear. It's called pandering and it's a favorite Democrat technique.

So I have no compunctions about hammering Donald Trump. We've got enough trouble with the current crop of "Let's Make a Deal" country club Republicans in Congress and the Senate.  Do we really want to elect the king of "Let's Make a Deal" to the highest office in the land?

Tom King (c) 2015