By As a TV personality Donald Trump knows how to play to an audience, which may be how he has become so popular in the polls for the 2016 presidential campaign.
What seemed like a joke in its inception now has become a driving force for the GOP.
He has become a beacon of change for the Republican Party, and this is due to this presidential hopeful’s ability to play toward his audience’s pathos. This shows in his polling spike from 3.2 percent at the beginning of April, to 33.6 percent just last week, according to the Huffington Post Pollster.
One of Trump’s more noteworthy comments that has attracted both a surplus of criticism and praise is one from his presidential announcement speech in June when he claimed that immigrants “flow like water” in the United States.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us,” Trump said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
He claims that we need to end this travesty by deporting undocumented immigrants in our country, along with their naturalized descendants, forcing Mexico to pay for a wall built along our shared border, and increasing regulation on legal immigration.
This stance has cost him ties to many major corporations, including Macy’s, where his line of business wear is sold. The supporters however, were overjoyed by this remark.
These facts come from data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which does not state the proportion of criminal offenders that are undocumented citizens imprisoned due to being in the U.S. illegally.
Yet this is a hot button topic to GOP voters who have seen this as a serious issue since the early ‘90s where the population of undocumented immigrants was 3.5 million people. As of 2014 this number has increased to 11.3 million with Mexicans now making up 52 percent of this population, a steady decrease since the 90’s.
Yet, the Trump supporter still sees it as a flood from the Rio de Janeiro.
Trump has also been known to call into question the legitimacy of President Obama’s citizenship and faith, so it is no surprise that when someone questioned his faith, Trump gave a non-answer.
He was one of the first to publicly ask President Obama for his birth certificate and the driving force behind the demands for proof of his natural citizenship. He criticized McCain for taking away the microphone from a supporter who made a similar comment.
“[Trump] is fueling a level of paranoia and prejudice against all kinds of people and when you light those fires, you better recognize that they can get out of control,” Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said on CBS Facing the Nation. “And we should start dampening them down and putting them out.”
Trump seems to feel that his prejudices have fueled his campaign, despite the lack of viable evidence supporting these kinds of comments. He knows that his Republican audience truly believes that their country should be a “Christian state,” and outwardly opposed to immigrants from Mexico, to Muslims and to women’s rights.
He also knows his supporters are a majority of pro-life supporters. As if to say he would hand pick which health services for the government to fund.
Yet what he doesn’t note that abortion is only a small 3 percent of services given in the last year at Planned Parenthood offices. For many people, these offices have been a safe space to obtain STI testing and treatment, contraception advice and prescriptions, as well as routine OB-GYN procedures needed for prenatal care and during pregnancy.
The plan to defund Planned Parenthood is yet another privileged fight that we need not have. And according to Title X federal funds are not allowed to be used for abortions. However, Medicaid, a large contributor to Planned Parenthood funding, allows it in certain cases. Even then, it is under state and not federal jurisdiction as to what falls under the “medically necessary” category of abortion, according to the Hyde Amendment of 1977.
The state covers the cost of these procedures. Trump’s presence on the Republican bandwagon is good strategy and will keep him high up on the polls but there is hope for those who fear the reality TV star’s rise to power.
It has been the trend that candidates, who poll high early in their campaign, don’t make it to the nomination. As shown with Joe Lieberman in 2003, Rudy Giuliani in 2007, Rick Perry and even Hillary Clinton in 2011.
The cold reality is that polls have no weight yet in the actual election or nomination; they are a great way to hypothesize how well a candidate is appearing. So while some candidates may appear to be doing poorly, this doesn’t mean that the public’s opinion of the candidate will remain the same.
It is slightly discouraging to see so many people share the same prejudiced, privileged opinions as Trump, and what shows through this support is how the public’s obsession with celebrity outshines any political prowess. However, there is hope that when it comes down to two candidates, those candidates will be competent.
