The Apprentice...
Darko Lazar
Donald Trump boasts an impressive resume - a real-estate mogul, a television host and most recently a front-runner in the US Republican presidential primaries.
What started out as a political joke and a sideshow in the already theatrically charged US Presidential race has now mushroomed into a serious contest for the spot of the national Republican candidate for president.
But is Donald Trump actually electable?
At 69, Trump may be a lot of things, but he is no statesman, and by the looks of it, he does not care to be one.
Instead, his goal is to get attention and raise his profile for things he does like to do when not running for president - organizing the ‘Miss Teen USA' beauty pageant, firing people on television, and propping up his global real-estate empire.
And it's working.
Trump is a darling of the international media; the one that ‘everyone loves to hate'.
He is a magnet for website clicks and YouTube views, and guarantees heated debates on political television shows.
The race for the White House has long ceased to be anything more than political theater. Today, it is very expensive political theater.
And with the gap between the policies of the Republicans and Democrats narrowing - at least in practice, thanks largely to the fact that American politicians receive their campaign money from the same people - the gladiators of US politics need to put on a new and improved show for the masses every four years.
The 2016 US presidential elections were initially shaping up as a campaign to justify why Bill Clinton may end up living in the White House for a total of almost two decades.
Enter Donald Trump, the entertainer.
The New York billionaire has been a gift to Hillary Clinton's campaign.
His antics, which have been sucking up the political oxygen from other Republican hopefuls and dominating the airwaves, have allowed Clinton to run her campaign with little media scrutiny.
When he entered the presidential race, Trump already had a suspicious political history. He was a Republican, then a Democrat, and now a hardline populist conservative.
Speculation over his role in the Republican Party was rife even before former Florida governor Jeb Bush tweeted that, "Maybe Donald negotiated a deal with his buddy Hillary Clinton. Continuing this path will put her in the White House".
Trump, who is a New Yorker, where Hillary served as governor, has enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Clintons for years. And by some accounts, it was a phone call from Bill Clinton in May of last year that convinced the real-estate tycoon to enter the presidential race.
Initially downplaying Trump's campaign, Hillary changed her tune following her rival's recently proposed ban on Muslims entering the US.
Stepping in as the voice of moderation Clinton said, "Now he has gone way over the line. What he is saying now is not only shameful and wrong, it is dangerous."
Not as dangerous, perhaps, as Clinton's comments a few weeks prior, where she prided herself on having the entire Iranian people as her enemy. Few global media outlets gave that much attention.
Even more dangerous and equally underreported was the introduction of a bill in the US House of Representatives called the Visa Waiver Program Improvement Act of 2015.
The new piece of legislation, which was introduced on the same day that Trump made his own inflammatory comments, casts US citizens of Arab, Iranian, and Muslim descent as second-class citizens in their own country. The bill was passed by an overwhelming majority: 407-19.
Recent polls showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed Trump's ‘ban on Muslims' idea, suggesting that America is not quite ready for such a direct approach to matters concerning civil liberties. So in the meantime, politicians like Clinton and Trump will create the necessary theatrics while bills get passed in the interest of ‘national security', making sure no opinion polls are taken on the matter that would disturb the process.
Trump has certainly tapped into a segment of American society where racism and especially anti-Muslim sentiment have flourished.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted after Trump's December 7 call for a ban on Muslims entering the US, showed him leading the field with the support of 33 percent of Republican voters.
Aboyomi Azikiwe is the editor at the US-based Pan-African News Wire and he thinks that, "Trump is appealing to disgruntled white Americans who have been impacted severely by the economic crisis since 2008."
But that is not enough to get him to the White House.
It may, however, be enough to pave the way for the nation's first woman president.
And regardless of who is actually in the White House, Washington's anti-Muslim sentiment, which is deeply rooted in American political culture, is all but certain to remain the same.
Source: al-Ahed News
