How credible is Trump\'s claim as a unifier?

Believe it or not, Donald Trump is now branding his campaign as a movement for law and order! In New York, while naming Governor Pence as his running mate on July 16 with two days left for the party's convention in Cleveland starting on July 18, the Republican presidential candidate also announced that as President, he would unite the country.
Donald Trump has ran one of the worst campaigns ever to win the nomination of his party, the Republican Party, if ethics and morals were the issues. He aroused racial and religious hatred and bigotry never seen in the US following abolition of slavery in 1865 and success of the civil rights movement in the country in the 1960s. He demanded a ban on Muslims, said he would pack 11 million illegal immigrants and send them back to the countries they came from and build a wall with Mexico to keep 'rapists and drug smugglers' from entering the United States.
He disdainfully said that he would bomb ISIS in Iraq and Syria without caring that such bombings would kill thousands of innocent people who are also the victims of ISIS and its terrorism. He would welcome the North Korean dictator to Washington as President and praised Saddam Hussein for killing 'terrorists' without due process. And still, he wanted Americans to believe his campaign to be a movement for law and order and also his call for national unity.
School kids would have trashed Donald Trump's claims as a law and order campaigner and unifier if they were allowed to write in their school newspapers on US politics. Yet the US media found merit in his claims! In a New York event, he also boasted that he had won more votes than any recent Republican candidate in the primaries/caucuses and that his 14 million votes were much more than what the conservative legend of the Republican Party Ronald Reagan had won.
The media made no efforts to explain who voted for Donald Trump. It also did not make any efforts to analyse whether there was any explanation behind the fact that there were 16 candidates who ran with Donald Trump in the primaries. When Donald Trump entered the race, no one in the party thought he would have any chance to go anywhere with his desire. Those who thought so did not consider that Donald Trump was from the world of entertainment and though he had stated that he hated  'political correctness', he had many more tricks than the politicians he held in contempt.
The main trick he played was to divide the Republican Party. He correctly assessed that his 16 contenders were mainly mainstream Republicans who were all appealing at the same time to various shades of conservatism. He further correctly assessed that 30 per cent of the Republican voters were from the extreme right who hated blacks, immigrants, Muslims and Hispanics/Latinos, and who wanted the United States to bomb ISIS territories without caring how many innocent people would be killed. They wanted someone to tell them that the US would again dominate the world and did not care to be told how.
Trump brought hatred into his campaign. In energising his extreme right base, he even praised Saddam Hussein for the way he had killed 'terrorists' without due process. He also stated that he would not hesitate in inviting the North Korean dictator to Washington because he did not see anything wrong with the style he ran his government. His campaign is based on spreading fear and distrust against the minorities in the United States. His praise for Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Un  should have destroyed his claims that his campaign is for law and order because that law and order would be modelled after North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
In fact, the US is now witnessing some of the outcomes of the racial hatred that Donald Trump's campaign has unleashed in the country's politics. In Dallas on July 08 and in Batten Rouge on July 15, black men killed eight policemen after white policemen had killed black men for alleged law and order violations in recent times where those killed would not have died were they not black. In the case of one, Philando Castile in Minnesota, a white policeman shot him four times at point blank range that his girlfriend videotaped and released on the Internet. This established that he was the victim of the worst kind of racial profiling.
In fact, the eerie regularity with which white policemen are killing black men across the country has been a matter of great anger and frustration among the black population in the USA and may have been one reason that encouraged those who killed the policemen in Dallas and Batten Rouge. This has also encouraged the blacks to call their movement 'Black Lives Matter'. It is now gaining in strength as a national movement, a new version of the civil rights movement of the blacks in the 1960s led by Martin Luther King. If any future President of America is to resolve this dangerous and evolving crisis, s/he would need to avoid for sure looking at Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-un for inspiration.
President Obama showed the American nation the way to come out of its present dangerous predicament with deaths of black men in the hands of the white policemen. In his address to an inter-faith gathering in Dallas on July 12 to honour the five white policemen killed there, he stated unequivocally that the need of the hour is to bring an end to the unbelievable gun laws in the country. That would give the police force around the country the freedom from fear when apprehending people in public for violating law and order irrespective of colour, he said. At the same time, he also called for a nationwide code of conduct for police that would make it difficult for them to use unnecessary force and, more importantly, kill.
In an editorial on July 14, The Washington Post stated the United States is facing an 'unusually clear moral choice' with the presidential election this November. That choice is to choose or reject 'candidacy of an unacceptable, dangerous demagogue.' That candidate is by now branding his campaign as a law and order one and himself as a unifier in the face of running a campaign that would undoubtedly destroy both law and order and unity of the country.
The writer is a retired Ambassador.
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