One of the primary purposes behind campaigning is to familiarize citizens with candidates, thus making it clear which candidate best represents one’s views on prevalent issues. This is only effective, however, if two key occurrences take place: one, the candidate answers honestly in order to appropriately fit their agenda and two, the candidate clearly and respectfully addresses the issues at hand.
Members of both parties will likely agree that this election is not exemplary of this. They will also likely agree that this is heavily due to one frontrunning candidate in particular: Mr. Donald Trump.
As a senior in Mr. Farmer’s civics class at Conant High School, I have followed the ongoing 2016 campaign avidly: watching debates, researching candidates, and closely following news networks across the partisan spectrum. I have not missed a single debate for either party. No other candidate offers answers as vague, simplistic, or brief as Donald Trump. Furthermore, Trump is repeatedly shocking the U.S. with crass, insulting and/or unprofessional remarks that both parties have described as appalling and unfitting of a presidential candidate, often violating intrinsic American ideals and even the Constitution itself.
Trump simply said in the Dec. 15, 2015, debate about border control, “I will build a wall. It will be a great wall.” While not giving any details about how this would be accomplished, he did stress that Mexico is to pay for it. It is absolutely dreadful behavior for an individual who is not yet president to think he has any right to bully other countries into heeding his will, nor should he behave as if becoming president gives him such power.
At a speech in Decker Auditorium in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump said, on video, about ISIS oil establishments, “I would bomb the s*** out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers… I’d blow up the pipes. … I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there and in two months, you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it’ll be beautiful.” Despite the fact that this may be the way some may feel, this is no way for a presidential candidate to depict an agenda, or conduct his or herself in general at any time. The vulgarity, the boorishness and the lack of tact demonstrated has no place, whatsoever, in a presidential race.
Lastly, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims entering the country, defiling the ideal that this nation was built by immigrants and abandoning the Constitutional belief that all men are created equal.
The generalization that all Muslims are dangerous is almost as dangerous as the terrorists themselves when one finds himself walking in the shadow of McCarthy, or even Hitler.
Let us hope that if we do find ourselves headed by a President Trump, that he understands that “those who do not learn from history are indeed doomed to repeat it.”
Ted Chartrand attends Conant High School.