The Tribune

Whether those three words best describe Donald Trump, his supporters, or everyone else, I can’t say for certain now, but Trump is surely stirring the political pot in the 2016 US presidential race. He is a livewire.

Remember when he owned Resorts International (Atlantis’ predecessor) for five minutes in the 1980s? He may not have done anything worth recollecting with the property, but he purportedly sold it for five times more than he paid for it, and maybe that’s just what he does – gets in, gets what he needs out of the deal, and gets out.

Maybe Trump’s bid for the White House is just the ultimate opportunist in action. Maybe he’s just there for the cheap and almost guaranteed publicity he gets from television networks who carry any story about him. Maybe his incendiary comments are meant only to give him play on a gigantic platform, so that he can communicate his ideologies about people and politics while the world is up in arms but hangs on to his every word.

‘‘Politico’‘ carried an article of commentary by Campbell Brown - once a news anchor at CNN and NBC - entitled “Dear Former TV Colleagues, Give Us a Week Without Trump“, where she pleads with fellow reporters to downplay Donald Trump’s antics and give him less television airtime. In it, Brown aptly describes Trump as “candy for the cameras”.

Brown further describes the reporters’ job as being to “ensure no one ever looks away” from the TV screen, stating that it is simply about ‘‘the bottom line’’ and what is considered ”good for business”. Plainly, Trump continues to get screen time because, by skyrocketing their ratings, he helps networks’ revenues to climb in the same fashion, ultimately fuelled by television viewers who can’t keep their eyes off radical Trump.

Recently, Trump has suggested that Muslims be temporarily barred from entering the United States in an effort to diminish the unknown potential of Islamic extremists to conduct their terror attacks on US soil.

As a descendant of immigrants, Trump cannot in his right mind hate immigrants. But people take his talk seriously and assume that because he has this particular viewpoint on Muslim immigrants (and previously on Mexican immigrants) that he hates all immigrants. And I guess I would take him seriously, too, if I thought that Trump was actually serious, or that he had a chance of winning the Republican nomination for US president.

I don’t know that Trump really gives a damn about his eligibility as a presidential candidate or Republican nominee. He says he’s gonna win all around, because he’s a winner, but I’m not convinced that he’s there for anything other than the limelight. People say he’s a narcissist, and narcissists love the limelight. So, I guess that fits. And because Trump is a radical of his own making, as Piers Morgan put it, “he just takes a firm position and smashes it into the public consciousness”. And that is why Trump stays in the limelight ramping up network TV ratings, public opinion polls ... and hostility.

On the one hand, he says what many people think but will never say, and on the other hand he has great shock effect. So whatever his message is, it will always hit hard and make people gasp and shudder. This is what he does. No one should be too surprised anymore.

In my informal surveys of people’s opinions of Trump, I’ve had responses ranging from “he’s crazy and the rest of the world believes the whole of America must be crazy to entertain him“ to “he’s crazy but I would still vote for him because he’ll save me money in taxes“ to “he’s not crazy ... he’s actually very conniving”.

And I follow that last opinion closely, as I watch him work the podium and stage, wowing and charming and offending all at the same time. It’s hard to believe that he is only a loose cannon with no self-awareness; he must know the impact this is having, and I’m inclined to think that’s the part he likes best.

He may not win the presidential race, but he would have entered stealthily into the minds of hundreds of thousands of people, not just in America but all over the globe. And maybe that is his bigger goal.

He believes strongly, obviously, in the right of free speech in America, such that he will say whatever comes to mind. It seems he offends or has offended just about everyone. Does that make him hateful, especially with respect to his most recent comments about Muslims, or is he just a fanatic or radical himself?

Trump is many things but he is not a diplomat. And that’s why, even if by some fluke of nature he wins the Republican nomination, he will never be president, because he has no idea how to diplomatically conduct himself. Can you imagine the meetings and negotiations? He could, even if inadvertently, lead his country into a very long war with some very warring people who are looking to pick a fight anywhere, any time.

As radical as he himself is, Trump supporters give their support because they either agree with him or they see him as being active and not passive like other leaders, namely Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump supporters believe nothing visible is being done by America with respect to the very visible and identifiable threats to America, and in essence they view current American diplomacy as passive. Which, for me, raises the question: is diplomacy effective?

Where is the threshold between failed or failing diplomacy and active policy? Mr Trump either thinks his policy ideas are both active and necessary, and the White House desperately needs him, or he thinks if he throws enough of a tantrum he will gather enough attention to force someone to take the action they’re not currently taking.

Whatever it is, it makes people uncomfortable, because it draws too much attention and wastes too many resources. Not to mention, it could look really bad on the world stage. But it’s not just Americans who are up in arms about this man; other countries even want to ban him and his many businesses from operating within their borders.

Often, what it sounds like to me - which is one thing I will agree with Trump about - is that there appears to be too much timidity in answering the problems at hand. The concern for not offending people, as he has said, has caused others to lose their lives.

When does political correctness give way to reason? Because, otherwise, what you’re really saying is there is no way to know for sure that anyone is a terrorist and therefore no way to fully secure or protect oneself or others? How does that work exactly in a vast land facing a growing, menacing opponent?

What should concern us most about Trump is that he could easily represent a significant number of people – average people, average citizens – who genuinely feel the same way he does for any reason under the sun.

Recent polls suggest figures nearing two-thirds of Republican voters are backing Trump’s Muslim ban. Other polls suggest more than half of Americans oppose such a ban, so I guess it really depends on who gets asked and by whom. Knowing that, even without Trump’s riotous remarks, these people feel so strongly; where does that put the future of America and the rest of the free-thinking world, especially when America tends to set the pace more often than follow it?

At home, we have our own radical livewire in Wayne Munroe. His comments about flogging immigrants to deter them isn’t hard to digest just because they seem extreme, but it makes one wonder, as is the case with Donald Trump, does he say these things to be taken seriously? Or are these comments a radical’s tool of agitation and distraction, to get in and get what’s needed, then get out?