News alert! Trump will allow London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan to enter America but will ban the rest of his fellow Muslims! How about the Saudi billionaires and the Sheikhs from the oil-rich Gulf States? Can they follow Sadiq? Lest Trump forgets, Saudi Arabia holds three-quarters of a trillion dollars in US Treasury bills. Were the Saudis suddenly to divest, it would almost certainly crash the dollar as well as global markets along with it.

The presumptive president of the ‘free world’, billionaire Trump, currently is dead drunk with electoral power that directly feeds into his corporal appetite. Beauty for him is skin-deep — he worships women with white big faces, flowing blonde tresses resting on tall well-endowed shapely frames. Exemplars of perfect physique are his wife Melania and daughter Ivanka. Ugliness for him is beastly — women whose faces are like “pigs and dogs”.

Trump wants to rid America of colour. There’s too much of it, he says. So, he plans to deport 12 million undocumented Mexicans back to Mexico. He calls them “rapists, murderers and drug dealers” who have sponged off Uncle Sam’s generosity for too long while making American babies. Off they go. Their American-born kids can hang on.

No more Muslims, either. In his first 100 days, President Trump will ban Muslims from all over the world entering America. Like the Mexicans, Muslims too are branded as killers by Trump. “Radical Islamists” have no right to enter America.

Can Donald Trump be trusted with receiving top-secret classified CIA intelligence briefings when he is finally crowned the Republican Party’s nominee this July?

How about the 46m African-Americans? Darn, they are Americans. The racist in Trump would love to deport them back to Africa from where their ancestors were enslaved and brought here. White supremacists like Trump and his followers clearly don’t like their blackness. But presently, the black vote is irrelevant for him. He just tolerates them. They are relegated to serving the whites as domestic help, security guards, landscapers and cashiers.

Trump must have a couple of thousand African-Americans servicing his fancy hotels and businesses. Plus, when Trump, 69, lives with his trophy wife, the model Melania, 46, and his lovely daughter Ivanka, 34, visits the White House, he would need scores of black servants to wait on the first family.

“I love women,” Trump declares with his characteristic pout. ‘That’s not true!’ shout his unfavourability numbers with women voters. Women don’t trust the sexist. Trump’s misogyny comes through when he says that women who seek abortion should be punished. Suddenly the man who once spoke of his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam, has grown wings and become holier than thou. Such moral posturing from a thrice-married politician, whose wanton history sends a different message to the American voters, is the new normal for the voters.

As a “serial philanderer,” Trump attacks his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton as an “unbelievably nasty, mean enabler” who “destroyed” the lives of her husband’s “mistresses”. A columnist at The New York Times says that, “one of the greatest threats to a presidential future is a profligate past”. Trump’s “carnal conquests are the cornerstone of his can-do braggadocio: ‘I have always seized the best and the most, and this country deserves no less. I score, and so should you.’”

The more he’s called a “vulgarian, pathological liar, utterly amoral, narcissist, and a bully” the more his 11m, and counting, voters vow to send him to the White House come November. The more un-presidential Trump acts, the more they love him. So who then are his voters? They are mostly white men — blue-collar, college dropouts, racists, bigots and religious xenophobes. They are disgruntled with the system that keeps them in poverty. They cheer him when he guarantees to ban Muslims entering America; they salute him when he vows to deport Hispanics; they hail him when he swears to keep Mexicans out by building a “yuuge” wall that Trump will get Mexico to pay for; and they applaud him when he pledges to bring back jobs that have gone to China.

Trump’s election slogan is: “Make America great again.” ‘How?’ ask analysts. Trump’s classic response: whipping up more toxicity that is a mix of bullying and bluster, xenophobia and nationalism, misogyny and racism. Such brashness appeals to the darker nature of the Republican Party voters and secures his place as the “unlikeliest presidential nominee in recent American history”.

Can such a blunderbuss — simultaneously an unbelievable joke and an undeniable threat — be trusted with receiving CIA intelligence briefings daily when he is finally crowned the Republican Party’s nominee this July? Can he zip up his mouth to prevent sensitive, classified, top-secret information only meant for the president’s ears and eyes from drooling out? Even President Obama thinks the country is flirting with disaster: “I just want to emphasise the degree to which we are in serious times and this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States.”

Hello, is anyone listening? Yes, many are but they have no choice but to support him. A former presidential hopeful, Senator Rand Paul, called Trump “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag; a speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president”. Now Paul has no choice but to support him.

The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, too has capitulated. Trump threatened to have him kicked out. Seven months ago, a Washington Post columnist vowed that if Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, he’d eat one of his columns. He’s getting ready to do that! Other Republicans who abhor him are also swallowing their words by jumping on Trump’s gravy train.

In his first interview with Time magazine, Khan said that if Trump becomes the president, “I’ll be stopped from going there [US] by virtue of my faith”. He got more than 1.3m votes, seen as the greatest mandate in the history of Britain. His election demonstrates that there is no clash of civilisations between Islam and the West.

“I am the West, I am a Londoner, I’m British, I’m of Islamic faith, Asian origin, Pakistani heritage,” Khan said, “So whether it’s [ISIS] or these others who want to destroy our way of life and talk about the West, they’re talking about me. What better antidote to the hatred they spew than someone like me being in this position?”

Take that Donald Trump!

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 22nd, 2016