Go Figure Trump

Just a day after I wrote about how nothing Donald Trump says or does seems to hurt him, businessmen, mayors, and even Republican leaders (including House Speaker Paul Ryan) are angrily condemning his insistence that Muslims from other countries. should temporarily be barred from entering the United States until Congress can sort out whom to let in the country.  Even the British people are aghast; 150,000 Britons have signed a petition urging Her Majesty's Government to bar the loudmouthed developer from their country, which would be inconvenient if it were to happen and if he were to become our next President. 

I guess Trump should be thankful he didn't call for a permanent ban on foreign Muslims.  

But if you think I'm writing to say that Trump has finally put a whole shoe store in his mouth and that it's going to kill his presidential campaign, you're dead wrong.  Trump continues to surge in the polls in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.  The notion of "President Trump" is a disgusting one indeed.  After all, his response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack paints all Muslims with a broad brush and sort of overlooks the fact that there are a lot of American Muslims, many of whom were born here and many of whom who were born here before having converted to Islam, and that most of them are appalled by the attack.  But he's still a presidential favorite because he appeals to Americans who fear Muslims as outsiders and also fear terrorism in general.  Trump's supporters also have a hard time processing the shifting demographics turning America into a multiracial, multicultural society at at time when the economy is leaving them underemployed, if they're employed at all.

America is changing faster than some people would like, and we also seem to be becoming a multicultural society faster than anyone can figure out how to make such a society work. But Trump isn't doing anyone any favors with his bigoted, incendiary rhetoric; it would do him well to think before he speaks.  Thinking after he speaks isn't helping him either.  On ABC, for example, he explained that his proposal wouldn't apply to United States citizens who are Muslims. "If a person is a Muslim, goes overseas and comes back, they can come back," he said. "They're a citizen. That's different. But we have to figure things out."

Right.  So far, I don't think Trump has figured out anything - least of all the grammatical sloppiness of mixing singular nouns with plural pronouns and using a plural contraction with a singular subject.