Trump leading fearful voters along path of cowardice

The compelling reasons why Donald Trump is unfit for the White House continue to mount, the latest being his threat to ban Muslims from entering the United State if he’s elected president. He apparently has forgotten that religious freedom fed this nation’s birth. His desire to play favorites among religions flies in the face of the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment.

Trump’s idea to jettison a cornerstone of American principles just because we are engaged in a military conflict with religious extremists is not only abhorrent but exposes Trump’s cowardice on the world stage. Our civil liberties were defined and defended at a time when entire empires wanted to destroy this country and nations were going to war with us. Now, suddenly he’s talking about walling our country off from those who embrace Islam, because of a squad of lunatics in the Middle Eastern desert.

To be sure, we’ve had our civil rights failures — slavery and its aftermath, denying blacks and women the right to vote, and the bleak period of American history when Japanese Americans were wrongly placed in internment camps during World War II while we were at war with an empire threatening our homeland and seizing islands off Alaska.

But Trump wants to sacrifice our most dearly held values out of fear of the Islamic State? Does he think the foundations of our country can be shaken, that we can’t survive any pressure?

We should do what we’ve always done: be tough, cleave to our values and deal directly with the threat at hand. But we cannot do this at the expense of other values that define us. To surrender any of our founding principles as a tactic to battle the Islamic State is to lose that war at the outset.

And to turn our backs on Muslims, or members of any religion that has been bastardized for military and political gain, is for us to cave to the group that seeks our demise.

Simply put, were Trump to have his way, we would lose more than the war by playing into the hands of our enemy; we would forfeit what distinguishes us as a country. Moreover, it would deny us the rich diversity of our society, which has served us well and includes Muslims who have moved here not to do us harm, but to embrace the Unites States for what it values and the opportunities it provides people of all faiths. The estimated 3 million Muslims who live here cannot be held liable for the evil perpetrated by the relatively few extreme radicals who have turned Islam on its head. The peaceful should not be held guilty by association any more than a religion should be penalized for its members who commit atrocities — even domestic ones such as the unspeakable crimes committed over decades by the Ku Klux Klan.

If Trump aspires to be president, he has to be presidential — by leading, not dividing. Instead, he is taking his malleable followers, enraptured by his pejorative rhetoric, down a coward’s path that denigrates the most basic principles of our nation.

In fact, that’s the only thing that saddens us more than Trump’s misunderstanding of who we are as a country: that many voters have lost their bearings as Americans by allowing themselves to be seduced by a craftily manipulative demagogue who is playing them like unwitting actors in a dark comedic reality show.

We are not surprised that Trump, in looking for support by calling for the wholesale suspension of American values, is wooing voters with his racism, bigotry, overheated rhetoric, fabrication of “facts” and fear-mongering. That’s not the way to earn the nation’s highest post, and other candidates must explicitly denounce him for his conniving strategy.

Then voters must focus on those candidates who grasp what is at stake, and the importance of understanding the underpinnings of our nation and what it means to be an American.