There’s been plenty of talk in this newspaper and around campus lately about the media circus that is the GOP (Republican) campaign.
Jolson Lim penned an excellent reflection on Canadians’ obsession with Donald Trump in The Charlatan last week, while students from the deepest depths of Loeb to the top floor of the MacOdrum Library are jokingly telling each other to “Make America Great Again.”
At its core, the media frenzy and political movement that seems to have only picked up steam since beginning as a joke sometime last year is just that: a joke.
Donald Trump will not become president, just as Stephen Harper’s campaign was irreparably doomed last fall when he tripped and then choked himself by implementing a campaign of fear and hatred. Of course, Trump is running in America—the land of excess, where everything is done 10 times louder, larger, and more abrasively than necessary—and thus is running on a fear-hatred (let’s call it fatred, since he is a little husky and often red-faced) campaign infinitely more offensive than Harper’s.
But the political mistake is the same. By campaigning on messages of fatred during times of relative good fortune in their respective countries, both Trump and Harper alienated themselves from many fence-voters and even some of those within their own party.
It is unfortunate that the Republican Party, which has a number of experienced politicians who would put up a sterling opposition against Hillary Clinton, is self-immolating itself on “eau de Trump.” Jeb Bush, infinitely better-qualified than both Trump and his brother George W. in 2000, has already been claimed as a casualty of the Trump train. The lone candidate still preaching positivity, John Kasich, is lagging well behind in polls and not far from dropping out. As long as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio continue to split the non-radical Republican vote, Trump’s path to the GOP nomination is clear.
Yet as Trump will soon learn, messages of hatred and fear just do not work in Western democracy. It didn’t work for Harper last fall in the Canadian federal election, it hasn’t worked for a variety of European leaders—incumbents and challengers alike—and it won’t work for Trump later this year.
Despite its longstanding socioeconomic problems, 21st-century America is no post-Versailles Germany, and no message of hatred will elect the next leader of the free world.
