Sure, it’s easy to make fun of Donald Trump. The front-page of the New York Daily News portrayed him as a clown.
The mocking mainstream media had a field day after Trump announced that he was running for President. The speech was “like it was plagiarized from an old drunk man mumbling to himself in a bar,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist, Red Huppke.
Others called Trump egotistical, bombastic, a bloviating buffoon.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart sounded positively gleeful about the Trump event saying “it was over a half-hour of the most beautifully ridiculous jibber-jabber ever to pour forth from the mouth of a billionaire.”
How hilarious. It’s easy to sit back and have a good laugh at those we despise.
But there’s a dark side to the thrill of political hating. It contributes to a nasty climate of cynicism, distrust and even despair.
“We citizens need to look inward a little,” says Arthur C. Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute.
“Whether or not we want to admit it, political hate is a demand-driven phenomenon. We are the ones creating a big market for it.”
This week Donald Trump is the most searched Presidential candidate on Google.
Do your own calculation. For every newspaper article, radio or TV story about a new idea or a constructive way to think about a political problem, there must be a hundred examples of ridicule, sensation or mockery.
What the heck are we doing to our public square?
I agree with Arthur Brooks. You can fight back. Whatever your own view of the world, “avoid indulging in snarky, contemptuous dismissals of Americans on the other side.”
Here Hear! 
12 reasons why I’m voting for TRUMP and why you should too…http://furfeathersntales.com/2015/06/18/trump/
Good one
Sent from my iPhone
>
Well said, the world could do with more kindness !
Donald Trump is one of a new breed of faux politicians who use a Presidential run as a means of securing greater public awareness to secure or enhance a celebrity status that generates television shows, books, speaking fees, etc. Faux politicians who abuse the right of passage that is running for President should be hooted off the stage.
Who else is a faux politician in the Presidential race? I don’t agree with his views or like what he stands for. But Trump has run something that worked in the business world
Dear Richard,
After watching our conscientious president gored for six years by lying jackanapes, I’m hardly going to argue in favor of ADDING to all the slander and disrespect being tossed around. But TOO MUCH IS TOO MUCH!
You wrote this column when?, at the beginning of the Donald Phenomenon? Watch it grow. I guess calling him a clown isn’t the way to stop him. But he’s a complete phony, a liar about his business acumen, a narcissistic egomaniac, and simply a jerk. But he’s also entertaining. People like being entertained.
I did a little mental review of the 16 GOP presidential candidates, and you know what? I counted nine of them as clowns. Christie I don’t have to tell you about. Huckabee–did you ever see him on the YouTube video when some ventriloquist jerks him around as a Cher puppet? Santorum–are you kidding? Lindsay “I Can Prove I’m Not Gay, Cuz I Love Every War That’s Ever Been Proposed” Graham. And it goes on.
Here’s the problem as I see it: we want to be polite and give the opposition the benefit of the doubt. But some times (Joe McCarthy, for example) they clearly don’t deserve it, and if we treat them like just another “voice,” we’re doing the political universe a disservice; we should be shouting their mendacity and clownishness to the housetops. The problem is: Where is the line between the times when we should be good boys & girls and act polite, and the times we should be truthtellers and call a creepy clown a clown? Have you figured it out?
Larry
Too bad that you missed my point. I said nothing in defense of Trump. Only that the public square has become too toxic. Should we be nice and polite all the time? No. Is there