Trump keeps digger deeper hole
If Donnie Trump doesn’t win the presidency, he can always become a ditch digger.
Nobody can dig themselves deeper into a hole, once they get started.
When Gold Star parents, Ghazala and Khizr Khan stepped onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention, nobody would have guessed they’d become the glowing examples of Trump’s unsuitability to become president of the United States.
All it took was for Khizr Khan to clearly state his undying support for this country; to claim that, unlike he and his wife, Trump had “sacrificed nothing and no one;” and for him to hold up his personal copy of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees religious freedom – and Trump got out his shovel and start digging.
And when a shovel isn’t handy, there’s always Twitter.
He just can’t help himself.
“While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has NO RIGHT to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things,” Trump wrote in a statement.
He’s patting himself on the back for reading the Constitution, while he claims some has NO RIGHT to express the part about free speech.
He must’ve missed that part.
On the Sunday following Mr. Khan’s speech, Trump appeared on ABC, and he tried to compare the sacrifices he’s made as a billionaire real estate developer, to those of a father and mother who’ve lost their son in battle.
“I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve create tens of thousands of jobs,” he proudly, and I might add, stupidly told George Stephanopoulos.
He may have well have said, “When I become president, I’ll be forced to take a pay cut.”
Or, “All of this campaigning makes me miss my tanning bed.”
Most decent people, those who have any sense of shame, would know that nothing, nothing can be compared to the loss of a child.
But Donnie Trump tried it.
Yet, despite his obvious desire to defend himself against the Khan’s open hostility toward him, he dug himself even more deeply, with his statement about Mrs. Khan’s appearance at the Democratic convention.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably – maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me,” Trump said.
To Trump, she wasn’t a grieving mother, who stood on a stage in near tears. She was a Muslim woman, who fit the stereotype of a woman under the thumb of her Muslim faith.
Here’s a list of countries: Turkey, Indonesia, Senegal, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Mauritius.
Now here’s a list of the MUSLIM women who’ve been heads of state in those countries: Tansu 脟iller, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Mame Madior Boye, Atifete Jahjaga, Roza Otunbayeva, Sheikh Hasina, Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia and Ameenah Fakim.
Trump had carelessly used the Republican fiction that a Muslim woman can’t be anything but powerless, and oppressed while in the presence of their husbands, when there are Muslim woman around the world, who are anything but powerless.
Here’s another country: the United States of America.
Here’s the women who’ve become the heads of state of that country: (this space is blank).
But I think Donnie is working mighty hard to “un-blank” that space.
To imply that Mrs. Khan is incapable of being thought of as anything but a Muslim, is disturbing.
She may have lost her son, but to Trump, she’s still only Muslim.
That carries the same stench as Trump’s tirade against the judge in his Trump University fraud case, as only be a Mexican, especially when he’s not one.
These constant lacks of judgement on Trump’s part, have caused many Republicans to distance themselves from his erratic behavior.
Yet, they continue to support him.
That says more about them, than the man with the shovel.
They’re simply saying that he might be volatile, and that he might be an embarrassment – but he’s our embarrassment.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net