Donald Trump Has Chronic Foot in Mouth Disease

There’s no doubt about it. Donald Trump has chronic foot in mouth disease, and it is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, if it ever does. Big time. CNN correspondent M.J. Lee called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “brash” today, in an article on the CNN Politics website, about reactions to some of Trump’s recent statements, but that’s not really the right word for what Trump is. Obnoxious is far more accurate. You can be brash without being offensive, but Trump is far too offensive to ever be considered merely brash.

First, Donald Trump manages to alienate a crucial voting bloc – Hispanic and Latino voters – with his off the cuff remarks about how Mexico only sends criminals, drug addicts and rapists to the United States but, instead of excoriating Trump for his boldly stated ethnic slurs, other contenders for the Republican nomination lined up to say that what Trump said really wasn’t that bad.

ThinkProgress has presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Chris Christie coming out in support of Trump’s statements on immigration. According to ThinkProgress, Cruz said he doesn’t think Trump should apologize for “speaking out against the problem that is illegal immigration.” Christie reportedly said that he wasn’t personally offended by Trump’s comments. Memo to Christie: Why would you be personally offended? You’re not Hispanic.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul continued his policy of saying nothing of note about anything, commenting that he didn’t know what he (Trump) has been saying “but…he apparently is drawing a lot of attention.” Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum didn’t like the way he said it, but believed that he was focusing attention on an important issue, completely missing the point that Trump’s verbiage was the issue. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who continued to prove that he is the master of the non sequitur, said that he doesn’t view people as members of ethnic or economic groups, making him probably the only person on Earth who doesn’t. To be fair to the Republican party, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and South Carolina Lindsey Graham were all personally offended by Trump’s remarks. Of these, only Bush, who is married to a woman who was born in Mexico, and Rubio, a Cuban, had any real grounds for being personally offended by Trump’s remarks.

So, maybe those remarks really weren’t that bad after all. Well, no, actually, they were, and the fact that many Republican presidential candidates don’t get that demonstrates exactly how tone-deaf the GOP has become. Not only did Trump alienate a crucial voting bloc, he also outraged a significantly wider segment of the voting public who, while not Hispanic themselves, feel themselves to have a common cause with the maligned Latino voters. These groups include all people of color because, quite often, Anglo Americans cannot distinguish between Latinos, black people and others with mixed ancestry. Trump also alienated the women’s vote, which doesn’t matter because he wasn’t going to get many women voters anyway, the gender differentiated community, who always identify with the underdogs since they have been underdogs for so long themselves….and the corporations that cater to these markets.

In other words, almost everyone. So, what was Trump thinking?

Trump, you see, is crazy like a fox. He’s still crazy, but he’s not stupid. Right now, Trump isn’t running for president. He’s running for the Republican presidential nomination and, guess what, the constituencies that he has been offending, are dramatically underrepresented among registered Republicans so that Trump isn’t losing as much as you might think he lost by offending Hispanics, black people, etc. On the contrary, he is probably picking up steam among poor white voters who, for some inexplicable reason, have gravitated to the Republican party because they think the GOP represents them. They think that because the racist, xenophobic statements such as Trump has been making echo their own thoughts and feelings. It makes them feel right at home when the multi-billionaire candidate echoes their own opinions.

When you look at it that way, Trump’s diatribe against Hispanics starts to look pretty damned smart. It also undercuts two potential opponents, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, both of whom are Hispanic, by tainting them with the same brush that Trump used to paint a target on Hispanic people in the United States. It also hurts Jeb Bush, who has been openly courting the Hispanic vote, despite the fact that Hispanics are underrepresented in his party.

Trump is focused on the nomination while Bush is focused on the election itself, assuming that he has already got the inside track for the nomination, the natural arrogance of his own tribe becoming more evident as time goes on. It’s hard to be the son and the brother of presidents of the United States and still take buffoons like Trump seriously.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to dig in with his comments about building a wall between the United States and Mexico and getting Mexico to foot the bill. How, exactly, he plans do that is open to question. He can raise tariffs, if the Senate will go along with him and he willingly violates the NAFTA trade agreement in the bargain…but that only means that Mexican businesses will have to pay those tariffs, because the Mexican government isn’t going to. (Mexico can’t; they are almost as broke as Greece.) The net result will be that everything imported into the United States from Mexico (with the exception of illegal drugs, of course) will cost more as Mexican businesses offset the cost of the tariffs by increasing their prices. In the end, then, the people who will end up paying for Donald Trump’s Wall will be the American consumer as the price of everything that comes from Mexico goes up. (On second thought, if Trump were ever to build his wall, illegal drug prices would also go up because of the increased difficulty of getting drugs into the U.S. )

In 2014, the United States imported $297 billion worth of goods from Mexico, according to WorldsRichestCountries.com. That is 12.3 percent of the total of all U.S. imports, which makes Mexico our third most important trading partner, behind China (20.2 percent) and Canada (14.7 percent.) What would go up in price? Here’s a list of the top ten imports from that the US gets from Mexico:

In one of the most amusing international ironies, many of these products are being manufactured in Mexico by American companies that decided to offshore their production south of the border to take advantage of lower labor costs and less stringent occupational and consumer safety rules. This could be a case of chickens coming home to roost…if Trump were ever successful at either building his Wall or getting Mexico to pay for it.

Aside from the almost casual insult to our third most important trading partner, Trump is also saying quite bluntly that Mexico is sending its more unsavory citizens to the United States. Well, the facts are that Mexico isn’t sending anyone to the United States. The Mexican people who are coming here are coming here because living conditions throughout much of Mexico are so bad that they have no choice but to go somewhere else and, since conditions south of Mexico are even worse than they are in Mexico itself, their only remaining choice is to go north, to the Estatos Unidos.

Much of the chaos that Mexican immigrants are trying to escape results from the ongoing drug wars between various Mexican cartels, the Mexican government, and American law enforcement units operating in Mexico, all of which combines to create basically unsafe living conditions all along the border between the two nations, conditions specifically exacerbated by the Draconian, completely unrealistic and unenforceable U.S. anti-drug laws.

There’s another motivation behind Trump’s obnoxious behavior: he really can’t afford to make a run for president with his own money. Trump may be worth billions on paper, but that doesn’t mean he has billions of dollars at his disposal to spend on a presidential campaign. On the contrary, the only way a real estate mogul remains a real estate mogul is by investing in real estate and, as consequence, most of Trump’s money is tied up in real estate. He’s not nearly as liquid as he pretends to be, and his antics are designed to fuel a fundraising campaign for his candidacy.
Trump is heavily invested in resorts organized around tournament quality golf courses. The problem with that arrangement for Trump is that golf is a dying industry in the United States, with one golf course closing forever every single day of the year…but Trump keeps building new golf courses.

Trump’s in-your-face, I-take-no-prisoners campaign strategy does two things for him. It freezes Chris Christie out of the race by being even more obnoxious than Christie, stealing his shtick, and it may also generate a ground swell of contributions from the people who like Trump’s style to fill up his war chests.

He will never admit this, but then he never admits it when he’s wrong, which is why he has declared corporate bankruptcy four times. If this is the résumé for a fixer president, perhaps someone should remind him that nations cannot declare bankruptcy and start over again. Well, sometimes they can. Just ask Greece, but the United States can’t because that would drive the entire world economy over an edge we don’t want to ever go over. The last time we went over that precipice, another non-political Republican was in the White House and just like However, Donald Trump, if he were ever elected president, would arrive without a clue about what to do to jump-start a failing economy, no matter what he thinks about it.