Trump, the Captain and the Colonel

At first, I just thought it was entertaining. But then it became frightening. And now it’s just plain sad. I’m talking about Donald Trump’s antics. His recent statements about the Khans might have cost him the election in November. Until then, he’ll have plenty of chances to redeem himself — or to dig himself in deeper.

To recap: Last week, Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-American and a Muslim, was invited to speak at the Democratic Convention. He criticized Trump by asking if the Republican candidate had ever sacrificed anything during his life. Khan said this while accompanied by his wife, Ghazala, who chose to remain silent.

Evidently, the following weekend, Trump jumped at the chance to respond, first during an ABC interview and then on Twitter on Monday. “Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same – Nice!” he tweeted. (Yesterday, The New York Times revealed that Donald Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War: one for orthopedic problems and four for education.) Trump also raised questions about Mrs. Khan’s silence, opining that her husband had made her keep quiet.

His comments would have slipped through the cracks if it weren’t for one detail: The Khans’ son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004 in a bomb explosion. Trump totally underestimated the immense respect that Americans have for veterans and their families. You don’t touch veterans. Period.

Trump, the king of lowbrow and mean-spirited attacks, who said that Bette Midler is ugly, Hillary Clinton is the devil and Mexicans are “murderers and rapists,” missed a good opportunity to shut his mouth. He has since become the target of much criticism, including from his Republican colleagues.

This umpteenth Trump blunder tells us a lot about politicians’ use of social media. It’s rare to find politicians who use it effectively. You either publish empty thoughts that no one cares about, or you act crazy and get into the doghouse. Trump is more often than not in the doghouse.

For months, social media experts have analyzed Trump’s usage of Twitter: the way he gets the most out of his 140 characters and especially how he uses it as a weapon. Because that’s what Trump uses it for the most: to attack and K.O. his opponents with insults and degrading comments.

When you lead a party or even a country, you can’t be a mechanical doll or a puppet. But you should still listen to the wise people around you. For now, Donald Trump seems like a toy car that lost contact with the remote control and is zigzagging around the kitchen table.

Can you imagine how stressed the heads of the CIA are? As tradition dictates, members of the American intelligence community will soon have to meet the main candidates in the race and inform them about military operations and important issues in international relations. According to several sources, the CIA’s top brass is afraid of sharing this information with a man who has no filter. I’ll bet that when they meet with Trump, each word will be weighed carefully.

But what’s most shocking about Donald Trump being at the heart of this election is the increasing loss of respect toward the institution that is politics. Donald Trump, a vulgar, mean, ignorant man, who is running a campaign based on fear and threats to the survival of white America, has become one of the two main contenders for the White House. It’s incredible. Are American citizens so confused and disillusioned that they can no longer choose quality candidates to govern their country?

Despite this, I still trust Americans and I believe that when the time comes, they won’t choose Donald Trump. I also believe that Trump will stick a spoke in his own wheels. Yesterday on Twitter, Donald Trump published a photo of himself in front of a bucket of KFC. Through his whole life, good old Colonel Sanders told us that his chicken had to be eaten simply because it was “finger-lickin’ good”; the billionaire was digging into a famous “secret recipe” chicken breast with a knife and fork.

The man who calls himself the voice of ordinary people was the target of much citizen criticism. “Eating KFC chicken with utensils on your private jet doesn’t make you a man of the people,” wrote some.*

And what if, around a hundred days before the election, “ordinary people” started to understand that a man who doesn’t honor the memory of an army captain (or the wishes of a colonel) isn’t the man who should inhabit the White House?

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.