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No Stopping The Trump Train

All photos courtesy of Trump campaign.

All photos courtesy of Trump campaign.

If everyone is attacking you, you must be doing something right. If the adage is true, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump must be doing a lot of things right. Despite ferocious attacks from mainstream media, Democrats and even his own party’s establishment, Trump continues to rise in the polls. Those who seek to stump the Trump must understand what he’s doing right if they’re going to stop him, because clearly what they’re doing now is not working.

Besides his status as a billionaire celebrity who allegedly can’t be bought, Trump is doing at least three things right in the minds of his supporters: his hardcore stance on illegal immigration, his attacks on trade deals such as NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership, and his total destruction of the political correctness that has strangled real debate on these and many other issues for decades.

I don’t think even Trump understood the power he was tapping into when he began his campaign last summer by declaring “we’re going to build a wall” on the border between Mexico and the United States. For decades, illegal immigration has been a hot-button issue for the Republican base, which believes it has been betrayed by the GOP establishment. Indeed, the Republican National Committee, in the wake of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid, declared the party must soften its approach on illegal immigration in order to attract more Latino voters. With one press conference, Trump trashed that plan and shot to the top of the polls, where he has remained ever since.

He was of course instantly branded a racist, in large part because most of the estimated 13 million to 20 million illegal immigrants (the government doesn’t know the actual number) in the United States are Latino and come from Mexico and Central and South America. But despite his occasional incendiary comments, I don’t believe Trump is a racist.

I think Trump, being a businessman, just looked at the numbers. Although whites are expected to become a minority (but still the largest minority) by 2050, they currently constitute the majority. Republican voters are overwhelmingly white and percentage-wise, white people register and turn out to vote in larger numbers than African Americans, Latinos and Asians. Rather than carve out enough Latino votes to win the general election, the dubious advice given by the RNC, Trump went all-in for the white vote, calculating he can win if the turnout is high and enough blacks, Latinos and Asians come along for the ride.

Meet the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare: African Americans for Trump.

Meet the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare: African Americans for Trump.

With record numbers of voters turning out to vote for Trump in the Republican primaries, including blacks and Latinos, it’s no wonder why the predominantly liberal mainstream media, Democrats and even Republicans are pulling out all the stops in a so-far failed attempt to derail the Trump train.

Trump’s a racist! His hair is fake! He has a small penis! Trump has been called Hitler so many times, the only thing that’s been diminished is Hitler.

Trump speaks to a wider audience when he addresses the international trade deals that have been rammed through by Democrats and Republicans over the objections of their constituents during the past three decades. Trump is correct that the United States is getting killed on trade. Ideally, trade between the U.S. and other countries should be balanced, with an equal amount of exports and imports exchanged. But U.S. trade hasn’t been balanced since the early 1990s, before NAFTA was passed. Our 2015 trade deficit with China alone was $366 billion. We are, as Trump likes to say, losing. Badly.

I prefer to look at free trade agreements such as the proposed TPP and illegal immigration as two sides of the same coin: Corporations can move factories overseas to exploit low-wage labor in third world countries, or they can hire illegal immigrants from third world countries and exploit them stateside. The end results are the same: less good-paying jobs for everybody who is in the United States legally. That’s just fine with what has come to be called the “donor class,” the globalist elites who fund both political parties in exchange for favorable legislation. They’ve never encountered a border they wouldn’t cross or a politician they couldn’t buy—until now.

Trump’s proposed policies on trade have been echoed by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, another anti-establishment candidate whose grass-roots popularity has confounded political pundits. In fact, Trump and Sanders share many of the same issues, from reigning in Wall Street to ending the policy of regime change in the Middle East (one reason Trump enjoys more support from American Muslims than his Republican rivals combined, despite his call for a temporary ban on Islamic immigration). Even Sanders’ voting record and past statements on illegal immigration are closer to Trump’s than the all-out amnesty open borders advocates propose for illegal immigrants.

Unfortunately, the Independent senator from Vermont chose to run as a Democrat, and despite the liberal claim that all Republicans are racists (some no doubt are), the Democratic Party has been the home of identity politics since the Reagan revolution; pulling the race card at this late date has become second nature. Sanders, at least at first, wasn’t playing that game and he paid the price. You could hear it early on in this election cycle, coming from the Democratic establishment, who upon seeing their anointed candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, upstaged by Sanders, began spreading the word that Sanders and his supporters were too white.

It came to a head last August when Black Lives Matter, a group that like Clinton receives funding from billionaire financier and open borders proponent George Soros, commandeered the stage at a Sanders rally in Seattle. In true BLM style, which is to say loud, rude and nonsensical, two female members aggressively demanded that Sanders let one of them speak “or your event is going to be shut down right now!”

Poor Bernie! The one candidate from either party who might actually care about the plight of African Americans humbly hung his head as the two BLM members ranted and raved at an understandably hostile crowd of Sanders supporters.

From that moment on, Sanders began playing identity politics, hanging out with BLM member Killer Mike (Killer Mike?!), proclaiming from the debate stage “When you’re white … you don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” abandoning a universal message, the fight against rising income inequality, that was playing well to all Americans, if not the Democratic establishment and donor class. Political correctness may have mortally wounded his campaign.

The train is leaving the station.

The train is leaving the station.

Trump, whom I believe fears running against Sanders more than Clinton, was quick to pounce on the Seattle incident as evidence of Sanders’ weakness. Calling it a disgrace, he vowed he’d never give up his microphone. “I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will,” he said. As it turned out, it was other people, the Secret Service and local law enforcement, who began regularly chucking out rude, aggressive, disruptive BLM members from Trump rallies, often with Trump’s vocal encouragement.

It’s that politically incorrect encouragement—in the old days we’d cart them out on a stretcher!—that led to the mainstream media’s latest attempt to stump the Trump. After a 78-year-old white man sucker-punched a black BLM member (who seconds before had been vigorously flipping off the old man with both hands) at a Trump rally in North Carolina, Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, Megyn Kelly and the entire cable TV news universe piled on, pretending that BLM is an innocent group of peaceful protestors instead of an overly aggressive disruptive force that seeks not dialogue, but to shut down anything it doesn’t like. Trump’s rhetoric was the problem, they said, not BLM’s ongoing uncivil behavior. The crescendo built all week long until a massive organized protest by BLM, MoveOn.org and pro-illegal immigration groups forced Trump to cancel his rally in Chicago last Friday, because he didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

“We finally stumped the Trump!” the mob celebrated, verbally and physically harassing Trump supporters who were peacefully trying to leave the event, waving Mexican flags, stomping on American flags and shooting off guns in the air. Maddow gloated that the “strongman” had finally been brought down. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, no friends of Maddow, agreed with her take on events. I watched in consternation, shaking my head the whole time.

They just don’t get it. Political correctness is dead; Donald Trump killed it. You’re no longer a racist if you oppose illegal immigration or you’re concerned about radical Islam. You’re no longer a protectionist if you oppose unfair trade deals. You’re no longer an isolationist if you’re against regime change and never-ending wars. Perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to be white to support Trump, and the fact that he won the majority of Latinos in the Nevada caucuses is no doubt driving the politically correct from both sides of the aisle insane.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday Two, with primaries in Florida, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio. Trump is leading the polls in the first three states and within striking distance of stealing Ohio from favorite son Gov. John Kasich, who also chimed in with the Trump-as-strongman theme. If things hold to pattern, and spurious attacks only make him stronger, I predict Trump will take all four states decisively, for all intents and purposes securing a lock on the Republican nomination.

If that turns out to be the case, expect all hell to break loose. The Republicans may shoot for a brokered convention to deny Trump the nomination. Trump in turn may run as a third-party candidate. The Democrats, concerned Clinton may be indicted for her use of a private email server while Secretary of State and opposed to Sanders’ socialist, anti-establishment agenda, may dust off Vice President Joe Biden. Or Secretary of State John Kerry. Or anybody.

The one thing I know for certain is that name-calling, penis jokes and political correctness aren’t going to stop the Trump train. If you don’t like the Donald, you better come up with something new quick.

R.V. Scheide

R.V. Scheide is an award-winning journalist who has covered news, politics, music, arts and culture in Northern California for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in the Tenderloin Times, Sacramento News & Review, Reno News & Review, Chico News & Review, North Bay Bohemian, San Jose Metro, SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Alternet, Boston Phoenix, Creative Loafing and Counterpunch, among many other publications. His honors include winning the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s Freedom of Information Act and best columnist awards as well as best commentary from the Society of Professional Journalists, California chapter. Mr. Scheide welcomes your comments and story tips. Contact him at RVScheide@anewscafe.com..

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