The Triumph Factor

"What Donald Trump said yesterday disqualifies him from serving as president. And any Republican who's too fearful of the Republican base to admit [it] has no business serving as president either ... "
"It's morally reprehensible. It runs counter to the constitution. And it has  consequences for our national security."
Josh Earnest, President Obama's spokesman

"Paris is no longer the same city it was. They have sections in Paris that are radicalized where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified. The police refuse to go in there. We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives."
"[This is a president [Franklin D. Roosevelt] highly respected by all; he did the same thing. [The nation was at war in the 1940s, and now is] at war with radical Islam."
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump

Philly Daily News

"I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America's attention on the need to secure our borders."
Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz

"I don't agree [wth Trump]. We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism, but not at the expense of our American values."
Reince Priebus, Republican national chairman

"This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for and, more importantly, it's not what this country stands for."
"Some of our best and biggest allies in this struggle and fight against radical Islamic terror are Muslims, the vast, vast, vast majority of whom are people who believe in pluralism, freedom, democracy, individual rights."
Paul Ryan, 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee

Not since Sarah Palin was selected as Senator John McCain's running mate for the Republican run at the presidency of the United States has the nation seen such raw, unadulterated buffoonery, an entitlement to right-wing declarations of national xenophobia and bigotry on steroids. Even her self-promoting pride as a backwoods-hunting-skidoo-driving yahoo comes a looong second to Trump's unapolagetic common-sense country-bumpkin persona.

His defense explanation of Muslim ghettoes that are no-go areas of grimy poverty and crime in France and Britain are also present in Germany and the Scandinavian countries with the non-assimilation of Muslim migrants into Western democracies, who agitate for state recognition of Sharia law, and view national customs and values with the contempt that Islamism seems to breed. But these are complex issues of two completely at-variant cultures clashing compounded by religion.

The Muslim populations that have assembled in North America are not a homogeneous cesspool of benighted jihad. For one thing there are the Ismaili and Ahmadiyya offshoots of mainstream Islam who are their persecuted minorities, both sects eschewing jihad in preference of living in harmony with larger non-Muslim populations. Not to mention the majority of Muslims representing the two major branches of Shia and Sunni strains who do see the utility of living in peace with their non-Muslim neighbours.

 Donald Trump, a man whose utterances are beyond offensive, is a crude charlatan posing as a politician, who portrays politicians as crude charlatans and himself as the antidote, a non-politician capable of leading the nation through common-sense decision-making to bring the country into a future of peace and prosperity, using his business acumen as an example of what he can achieve for a nation. Obama sold audacity during his campaign for the presidency, and Trump bought that audacity for himself.

Just as he is buying the presidential campaign, taking pride in being beholden to no one to fund his electoral chances. The big question for the American body politic is the electorate's choice and the demonstrated fact that this man whose revels in celebrity and entertainment is hugely popular with a base base. What to do about him, the uncouth racist, money-and-mouth celebrity is the question that looms large.

Regardless of his demeaning-to-others utterances, his declarations of capability and his offers of self as solace and solution to all the country's problems, from an aspiring dilettante whose ego is larger than his wealth, the faith of his followers stream after him. This is an American-made problem, and to date the current crop of supplicants-to-contention are not distinguishing themselves with much more cerebral functioning and integrity than Trump has.