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Editorial: Understanding Trump’s hatred

The world needs to come together to condemn Trump
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It would be nice to say that sitting up here in Canada, we don’t have to worry about Trump, since he’s not our president.

To feel that safe and smug, though, we would have to forget that this man, who’s stability is being questioned, has the ability to send a nuclear missile winging its way to North Korea whenever the fancy takes him.

“There’s actually very little to stop him,” said James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence and one of those questioning Trump’s fitness to be sitting in the Oval Office. Clapper’s comments came in a CNN interview Tuesday after Trump’s disturbing rally in Arizona.

Trump kicking off a nuclear holocaust isn’t the biggest thing the rest of the world has to worry about, amazing as that may be to consider. The U.S. president’s tacit support for the so-called Alt Right, white supremacists, racists, neo-nazis and KKK is a less obvious, but far more insidious and long-term threat to society.

In Canada, we’ve already seen the result of Trump’s initial refusal to call out those groups after the rally and murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, as well as his later claim that there was “very fine people” marching with the KKK and neo-nazis.

Plain and simple, there are no very fine people marching shoulder-to-shoulder with people chanting “blood and soil” or “Jews will not replace us.”

Trump’s increasingly horrifying responses to the Charlottesville murder, which he repeated at the Arizona rally, have emboldened these dregs of society. It’s been coming for a while, but Trump has helped these people feel more legitimate, as we’ve seen with racist rallies popping up, not only in Boston, but here at home in Vancouver and Quebec.

There’s still some hope. It was great to see counter-protestors turn out in greater numbers than the bigots.

But it’s not just the U.S. that needs to condemn Donald Trump. The whole world needs to make it clear that this is not the behaviour of a leader and let’s in the words of one sign at the Vancouver protest, “make ignorance shameful again.”