Please America, don’t let Donald Trump turn you into Donald Trump.
My social feed is mostly not composed of Trump supporters. Nonetheless I can’t help but notice a worrying trend. Sure, Trump is a childish bully with high school tactics and very little political substance who surrounds himself with ‘haters’. He has turned campaigning into a totally binary fight in which grey areas have been eliminated in favour of an extreme form of dehumanizing ‘us vs them’ attitude.
The problem is that his methods have become the ‘rules of engagement'.
Those in my social media feed fill it with jokes about his hair or the orange hue of his skin. They install Chrome extensions that replace his name with ‘Drumpf’ and they laugh. But what’s that, if not becoming just like him? Bullying the bully achieves nothing but turning ourselves into bullies. And as someone said: don’t argue with idiots, they’ll bring you down to their level and win with experience.
Trump brings the worst out of everyone. It’s a really sad state of affairs. But Trump is still a human being. We can’t dehumanize him just because he dehumanizes others. His hate-filled and belligerent rhetoric is either the symptom of someone who has not had the chance to learn how to live in a complex and diverse society, or that of someone who milks that issue in others by offering them a comfort zone where the ‘other’ is safely excluded, or, more likely something more complex.
Either way it’s working.
I’d rather see the vast pool of intelligent non-supporters of Trump be humble enough to use their intelligence to find ways to address the fears of Trump supporters more peacefully and inclusively than what Trump proposes instead of writing Trump off with moral or intellectual arrogance. That is only him winning by redirecting the debate, making it personal and childish.
So can we please raise the bar a little and not let him win by dragging all of us down to levels of pettiness ill adapted to successful country leadership? After all this really ought to be about the people of America (and of the rest of the world who can’t vote in this election), not about Donald Trump.
