Keel Hunt

In this past week of mass murder and meanness, we may actually have seen the beginning of the political end for Donald Trump, candidate for president.

Trump is not the man for this job, though he seems in no way to understand why, and that is part of the problem.

When it comes to facts about our dangerous world, Trump seems unmoored, unschooled and unwitting. He has demonstrated none of the preparation, restraint, nuance and cool that the world needs from a U.S. president. He keeps declaring “America First” because that’s all he knows to say.

It’s not only that way he has of making everyone else feel demeaned as irrelevant and inferior to himself. Nor is it just the constant anger and condescension in his eyes.

The real trouble with Trump is not his tin ear, his boastful rudeness, his self-aggrandizing ridicule of people and process. He seems no more capable of changing his arrogant tone than he can change his own thin skin.

On a surface level, Trump’s message and behavior are simplistic, crude, amateurish, childish. The casualness of his comments about nuclear weapons is heedless and frightening. He seems not to grasp what the fuss is about.

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No, what worries me most of all is how this troubled man — in his mortal fear of losing — has been setting the wrong things free. By his smug racial epithets and his easy stereotyping, Trump has unleashed demons that should have remained buried.

It matters what our leaders say. When enough people hear Trump’s isolating brand of rhetoric — pounded into them by ceaseless, repetitive TV coverage — you can bet someone somewhere will get the message that it’s OK again to smear a whole ethnicity, banish an entire religion and demean all women.

The world learned this style, too late, in the 1930s. It didn’t help Trump, in my estimation, that when he kicked off his campaign a year ago, I was finishing Erik Larson’s "In the Garden of Beasts," the story of Hitler’s rise. All of it was fueled by ruthlessness and the stirring up of nativist fear.

Many regular German citizens, at first, were amused by the odd-looking man and his screaming. Politicians might have thwarted disaster by speaking up but didn’t. Then, in 1934, came the Rohm Putsch — the “Night of the Long Knives” — and the world went upside down.

Trump is not Hitler, but, for me, Trump’s campaign is also no longer about policy or party but personal power. The impact of his reckless words threatens public safety — from the gun zealots his words inflame to the listeners who resent anyone who does not look or live or love like they do.

Trump emboldens them all, and social progress is lost step by step. I had thought in 60 years of racial progress we had moved past this.

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No question there is frustration in our country, anger toward the establishment and all that, but these are not reasons to install a demagogue in the highest office and put our nation’s well-being at the mercy of his latest tantrum.

The speculation that Trump might ask Sen. Bob Corker to be his running mate was actually chilling news. I admire Corker. His Senate service has been noble, and he is deeply qualified. His name on a Trump ticket would help Trump win, and that is the wrong outcome for our country. First of all, Trump is not qualified, and it would be Trump (not Corker) who would be in charge.

Now, Trump’s attacks on a U.S.-born judge of Mexican descent (the same judge trying the Trump University case) and opportunistic response to the Pulse murders in Orlando last weekend all seem to have brought about a tipping point of public disgust. Some national Republicans, whose collective silence has sustained and advanced Trump so far, are feeling the heat of outrage.

Some are beginning to speak out. Corker is one. We should be grateful.

Where are the rest? Where did you stand, back in 2016, when you had a choice in the face of a reckless menace?

Keel Hunt is a Tennessean columnist. Reach him at Keel@TSGNashville.com.