Donald Trump – The Lie Of ‘Truthful Hyperbole’
By Sir Ronald Sanders – CNS Contributor
WASHINGTON, DC – For anyone following the US Presidential campaigns, it has been a volatile voyage with great uncertainty about whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will eventually emerge triumphant.
We still aren’t into the season of direct debates between the two and the unleashing of their denigration of each other, although throughout the primaries we had a good sense of just how nasty it will become, mostly from Trump who has verbally assaulted just about everybody except himself and his family.
But this week the tide began to surge away from Donald Trump. The Republican Party Convention was a spectacle of division, pettiness, racism and lynch-mobbing when it wasn’t Trump trotting out his tiresome one-liners. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party Convention was sizzling with ideas; vibrant with new directions (fashioned by Bernie Sanders and now integral to the Party’s platform); and energised by powerful argument, analysis and values spoken with conviction and magnetism by Sanders, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
No one listening to Trump declaring himself ‘the greatest’; claiming that he knows just about everything better than everyone else; and that he will fix everything that he alleges is wrong with America, can help to wonder, as Bernie Sanders did, whether he is running ‘to be President of the United States or to be a dictator’. There is no doubt, given the personalities he admires, such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-un, that the dictator style appeals to him. It also seems to come very easy to him to attach demeaning terms to his opponents. Thus, ‘little Marco’ (Rubio); ‘lying Ted’ (Cruz) and ‘corrupt Hillary’ (Clinton).
For some time, there seemed to be a reluctance to call him out by his political opponents, especially those he beat for the Republican Party nomination. The one exception to that general pattern has been President Barack Obama, who, even before he took to the hustings in support of Hillary Clinton, had been unhesitant – even determined – to expose Trump as an ill-informed braggart who posed a real danger to the ethos of the American nation.
Here’s the passage from Obama’s speech at the Democratic Party Convention that pigeon-holes Trump and lays him intellectually and morally bare: “America is already great Read more
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