The Pope and Donald Trump

Participants in a BBC talk show following the unbelievable exchanges between the Pope and Donald Trump were disgusted with the latter. They were all unanimous in their condemnation of the leading candidate for Republican nomination in the US presidential election, 2016 for his disgraceful behaviour concerning the Pope. The exchanges with the Pope started when Donald called the Pope a tool in the hands of the Mexican Government opposing the US-Mexican wall. The Pope, when asked by a journalist about Donald Trump's comment on board his aircraft while returning to Rome from a week-long trip to Mexico, had said that a person "who thinks only of building walls and not building bridges is not Christian."
Under normal circumstances such a comment about someone who is aspiring to be the president of the United States would have been quite an unusual one. Nevertheless, as the participants in the BBC talk show underlined, Donald Trump more than deserved what he got from the Pope. Since hitting the national stage as a contender for the Republican ticket for the US presidential election, he has liberally abused and insulted every conceivable group except those in the Republican Party who suffer from racial prejudice and religious intolerance. It is incredible that someone who has trashed so many is being talked about in the mainstream US media as one with a reasonable chance of going to the White House.
It was therefore left to the Pope to tell Americans and its media that it is time for them to call a spade a spade and look at the real Donald Trump. By declining to accept him as Christian, the Pope said it all; that Donald Trump has demonstrated the very basic qualities that should make him unacceptable in the United States and the West where despite their secular beliefs, Christian traditions are the sum and substance of their civilisation. Thus, by refusing to accept him as a Christian, the Pope damaged his credibility that his disgusting behaviour on the campaign trail richly deserved for the Pope's authority to talk on Christians, Christianity and Christian values are unquestioned.
When Donald Trump started his campaign based on a tirade of lies, insults, and abuses, the media overlooked it all. It instead gave his candidature attention because it thought he was articulating the feelings at the grassroots against Washington. He cunningly used the term "political correctness" to gear up grassroots support. He said loudly that he would not refrain from saying unpleasant things because he was not afraid of being politically incorrect. The candidate had a point on the issue of political correctness when he started his campaign but by insulting all and sundry except his core group of extremists, he made nonsense of the issue of political correctness.
That is where the US media has been woefully wrong. It has failed to see the difference between the courage of one hoping to be the president of the United States to speak out for rights of marginalised people overcoming political correctness and abusing and offending all and sundry except his racially biased and religiously intolerant supporters whose causes he is now championing.
The Pope, known for his compassion for the welfare of humanity worldwide, thus did a favour to the US media when he drew its attention to what Donald Trump has been doing to their country and the values and principles upon which their great country is built. The Pope's wake-up call infuriated Donald Trump and he dismissed the Pope's indirect remarks about him as "disgraceful". He said that the Pope would regret what he said for when the ISIS would finally attack Vatican "the Pope can have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened." To undermine and slight the Pope, he again vowed to deport the illegal immigrants and to build the wall at Mexico border.
The Pope has had his share of criticism in the US media. In fact, some papers gave the thumbs up to Donald Trump for his disgraceful performance against the Pope overlooking that he had no business calling the Pope a puppet in the hands of the Mexicans in the first instance. Nevertheless, the media that saw a good side of Donald Trump in his war of words with the Pope was embarrassed when in his recent address to his supporters in South Carolina, he outmatched some of the most absurd statements he had made on his campaign trail so far.
MSNBC, one US media giant that has constantly trashed everything about Donald Trump said the following about his latest public speech: "Donald Trump closed his South Carolina campaign on Friday with a rambling speech highlighted by a giddy, almost childlike, enthusiasm for torturing and summarily executing the suspected enemies of America in the name of safety."  To create a frenzy among his racially-biased and religiously intolerant supporters on issues of terrorism and national security, he conjured up a story about John Pershing, the US General who fought Muslim guerrillas in the Philippines in the early 1900s. He said General Pershing "took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig's blood. And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said 'You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.' And for 25 years there wasn't a problem, okay?" In the same speech, Donald Trump said he was unimpressed with the banned interrogation tactic of water-boarding and promised, "to supplement it with far worse forms of abuse."
The media, this time, came out on the side of truth and trashed Donald Trump's story as one that had never happened. In fact, if the media in the United States wanted to be fair then they should take the Pope's message seriously and take a second look at Donald Trump and the litany of lies and abuses and hatred upon which he has based his campaign.
The writer is a retired Ambassador.
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