Stora tråden om Donald Trump [mod]

Trump’s real ideology is murky, but his targets are clear: Immigrants bring problems and take away jobs. Muslims represent the worst kind of threat: an internal one. America is corrupt and fallen, and by opening its doors to foreigners, tolerating difference, and insisting upon “political correctness,” it has suppressed the very people — that is, middle-class white families — who once made the country great.

(Perhaps to his credit, Trump hasn’t put opposition to gay rights at the center of his “traditional” agenda, unlike Cruz or Rubio, although he has been a consistent opponent of marriage equality.)

I don’t know how much Trump actually believes this stuff. As a developer from New York, he has lived among, socialized with, and made billions from and with the kinds of people portrayed in both of the shows above. But that doesn’t matter to his followers. Like McCarthy before him, he appeals to their suspicion that America is rotting from within, too weak or too tolerant or too deluded to remember that it was at its strongest before women, minorities, immigrants, and gays demanded a piece of a now-shrinking pie.

And that, ultimately, is why I see Trump as a threat, not just in what his candidacy means for America as a whole, but what it means for us as Jews. His message — of distrusting the foreign, of rejecting the new, of abhorring pluralism — is directly opposed to our history in this country and our best interests as a minority. And it is empowering people who reject the very notion of racial and ethnic diversity.

According to national polls, nearly 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Clinton, which would make her the most disliked presidential nominee in modern history. Even if incumbents are included, the only candidate with worse numbers was Jimmy Carter in 1980.