Somebody will pay, believe it
by Tom Sullivan
You have to wonder: Does Donald Trump have any friends? Really? Not many in New York, it seems. Maybe he should visit Mexico for Easter some time. He has lots of friends down there. Tre-men-dous friends. They love him down there:
Mexicans celebrating an Easter ritual late on Saturday burnt effigies of U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whose anti-immigrant views have sparked outrage south of the American border.
In Mexico City’s poor La Merced neighborhood, hundreds of cheering residents yelled “death” and various insults as they watched the explosion of the grinning papier-mâché mock-up of the real estate tycoon, replete with blue blazer, red tie and his trademark tuft of blond hair.
Media reported that Trump effigies burned across Mexico, from Puebla to Mexico’s industrial hub Monterrey.
Huh. It’s hard to imagine why poor Mexicans would want to do that to someone they love.
For some reason, Europeans love the World’s Most Dangerous Man about as much as Mexicans. Maybe less. Maybe because he’s talking about dissolving NATO at a time when Poland is worried about becoming the next Ukraine. Daily Beast foreign correspondent, Christopher Dickey, was rather blunt about it:
Well, these are frightening times in Europe for a lot of reasons. The economy is not in great shape, particularly here in France. The terrorism threat has been growing. There are wars all over the place, little wars that sometimes Americans don’t even notice. You’ve got the push by Russia into Ukraine and the threat to the Baltics. All this going on makes people very, very nervous, and they’d like to think that their American friends would be reliable friends.
But now, they see what looks very much like a circus to them. […] Europeans look at this and they don’t just scratch their heads. They shake their heads as though they’re looking at the doom of the world. They really see it as an incredibly negative thing and then when you’ve got Ted Cruz on the other side saying we’re going to carpet bomb places, well, good luck with that Ted.
That’s not going to take care of ISIS, but that is going to cause a horrific blowback against America around the world. So I think that they are looking at a situation where they believe they are reasonable people, Europeans, and they are looking at an American political situation that is extraordinarily unreasonable, theatrical and dangerous.
If the angry Republican base would care to break off and revive the Know Nothing Party, they’ve found its leader.