Donald Trump’s extreme rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and his penchant for siding with America’s adversaries and autocrats pose a unique challenge to his Republican opponents and, ultimately, US voters.
The ex-president, who has a good chance of being the next commander in chief, warned over the weekend that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. And he parroted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to discredit American democracy in his latest craven genuflection to the ex-KGB officer, who’s been accused of war crimes.
Trump’s comments on Saturday, at a rally in the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state of New Hampshire, are contrary to America’s founding values and political traditions. They are the latest sign that Trump, who sought to overturn the will of the voters after the 2020 election, would act in an even more extreme fashion in a second White House term. His rhetoric is also likely to play into the central premise of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign – that he’s the only option to thwart a return to power by an ex-president who could destroy US democracy. It is not yet, however, helping the incumbent in polls that show him trailing Trump in vital swing states.
It’s not a very good litmus test to determine right and wrong because tolerance is subjective based on what you feel to be untouchable, inviolable topics. Those could be religion, gender ideology, sexual preference, free speech, right to bear arms, right to own property, right to bodily autonomy, right to associate, and so on, or some combination of these but likely not all of them. It varies with the individual, though most would agree on some of them. The paradox of intolerance should not be expanded to include too much, because it then becomes simply another tool for rhetoric. In the Bill of rights our constitution does a pretty good job describing which topics are off limits, I think.