Leader comment: A denunciation of Donald Trump

Donald Trump, due to arrive in the UK later today, is a racist, a serial liar, and either a sex abuser or someone who falsely brags about being one in the apparent belief that this will impress other men in a metaphorical “locker room”.

To take each of these charges in turn, when black American football players protested against police shootings of innocent people of colour by refusing to stand for the national anthem, Trump said the players “maybe ... shouldn’t be in the country”.

And when white supremacists, neo-Nazis and armed militia groups demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia, over plans to remove a statue of a Confederate general – and a counter-protester was killed and others injured as a car was driven deliberately into them – Mr Trump claimed there were “very fine people” on both sides. Trump persistently pushed the lie that Barack Obama, the first African American president, was not born in the US. He has called for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, claimed Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals, said Nigerians would never go back to “their huts” after seeing the US and described African countries, along with El Salvador and Haiti, as “s***holes”. Trump also argued that an Indiana-born judge handling a lawsuit against ‘Trump University’ was biased against him and unfit to take the case because he was a “Mexican”.

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/leader-comment-a-denunciation-of-donald-trump-1-4767577

What The Boston Globe Thinks A Trump Presidency Would Look Like

With a satirical front page for their Sunday edition, the Boston Globe is giving readers a look at what they believe America would be like with Trump as president.

As the fake headlines make clear, the Globe’s editors are not optimistic.

“DEPORTATIONS TO BEGIN; President Trump calls for tripling of ICE force; riots continue”

“Markets sink as trade war looms”

“New libel law targets ‘absolute scum’ in press”

“Bank glitch halts border wall work”

“Trump on Nobel prize short list”

The page, dated April 9, 2017, will run at the front of the paper’s “Ideas” section. An editor’s note at the bottom of the page reads:

“This is Donald Trump’s America. What you read on this page is what might happen if the GOP front­runner can put his ideas into practice, his words into action. Many Americans might find this vision appealing,but the Globe’s editorial board finds it deeply troubling.”

End the Gun Epidemic in America

EDITORIAL

This is the first editorial published on the front page of the New York Times since 1920

​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.