Opinion: America’s love for entertainment is its potential downfall

Emily Harney

Donald Trump chats with fellow boxing fans ringside at the Gennady Golovkin versus David Lemieux fight last week at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

ALEXANDER OAKS, Contributor

When will people realize Trump has crossed a line? When will it become apparent that his misogynistic, immigrant-bashing rhetoric has gone too far?

Across the nation, America’s citizens have been gobbling up this toupee toting bigot’s words.  In an entertainment obsessed country, nobody seems to understand that this man is spewing racist filth about Hispanics and making crude remarks about how women are slobs and pigs.

Trump’s hatred of all peoples who are not straight, Caucasian, and Christian is shocking. How has this hateful person led polling for the Republican party’s race to find who should represent them in the general election?  How can it be that Ben Carson, the only person who has managed to challenge Trump, claims that a Muslim could never be President of the United States?

When a homeless Hispanic man was urinated on and beaten with a metal pole in Boston on August 19th, the assailants were asked why they would ever assault someone who posed absolutely no threat to them.

According to The Atlantic, a well known political magazine, the two men responded that Trump had been right all along; these immigrants needed to be deported and dispelled from the country. Scott Leader, one of the perpetrators of the hate crime claimed that, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

Trump’s insanely conservative rhetoric on immigrants and Hispanics has paved the way for sick minded people to forever alter the lives of others based on their nationality or ethnicity. Has the GOP field of eligible candidates actually been thinned so severely that this is the candidate they are left with? To make things even worse, the candidate decided to address the situation and console the victim by posting on twitter.

“Boston incident is terrible. We need energy and passion, but we must treat each other with respect. I would never condone violence.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2015 (Taken from Vox.com)

Most candidates would choose to meet the victim personally, or at least write more than a small handful of sentences meekly condemning an awful act of hate. Trump has never had a problem talking and rambling for long periods of time, but when it comes to violence against someone who is part of a group he has an irrational hate for, he cannot seem to muster much more than a half-hearted shrug.

As well as purposely maligning Hispanics and immigrants, the Republican front-runner has seemed to show a disturbing case of memory loss. In Washington D.C., according to The Washington Post, and thinkprogress.org, Trump employed illegal, undocumented immigrants to help build one of his hotels. Does he think that these people are “selling drugs or “raping” while they work to help maintain and expand upon his company?

How has America allowed this to go on? Just because someone inherits his father’s fortune and manages not to crash a mega conglomerate; just because someone can say “You’re fired!” in a comedic fashion; just because someone has an all too memorable face, does not mean they deserve to have a chance to be the face of the free world.

Donald Trump has no veritable claim to leading the United States, and his detriments are much too visible. Americans need to understand and acknowledge that being loud and yelling obscene things does not mean someone is qualified to be president. He has broken unspoken rules about common decency and unspoken rules about campaigning.

It is time for America to realize that the cheap entertainment he provides is only detrimental if we allow it to continue. At some point, defying political correctness ceases to be an excuse for gushing hateful and racist things about Hispanics or rage tweeting about women.

America needs to realize this, before we are locked into a four year term with someone who bears striking resemblance to a rooster, but with more hate, racism, and misogyny.