Presidential candidates can experience the same exasperation as the rest of us. Without condoning his latest example of personal outrage, it is difficult to deny that Donald Trump wants and demands an end to anti-American terrorism any less than we do. The statement he made about denying Muslims from any country and for any purpose to enter the U.S. called for “a total and complete shutdown until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” His idea of an ultimatum came just five days after a radicalized Islamic couple residing in this country shot and killed 14 persons and wounded 21 in a massacre at a San Bernadino clinic for the disabled where the husband had worked. Trump’s initial reaction was, and who are we to judge his personal feeling of urgency and responsibility, understandable.
In a way the billionaire candidate was both inadvertently and purposefully using the underlying message of his well-known TV putdown, “You’re fired,” to rebuke and castigate all Muslims even though only the criminal acts of extremists are the rightful target. But the buck stops here when you are sitting in the Oval Office and that’s what a growing cross-section of citizens admire about The Donald, who continues to lead the polls of GOP contenders. What’s more, at a Long Island rally to negate Trump’s threat, leaders also criticized Republican candidates Ben Carson and Ted Cruz for comments they thought cast Muslims in a bad light. So it’s all a matter of vantage point and voters in the 2016 election will have to compare the opinion of each candidate, Republican and Democrat alike, to see which stacks up with their own.
—Joe Krupinski
