Donald Trump is a chest-thumping gorilla reminiscent of Mussolini, while Ted Cruz is a devious fanatic with similarities to Stalin, making him far more dangerous.

After declaring that it has detonated a hydrogen bomb, North Korea has launched a long range rocket. This is making South Korea, Japan and the United States jump up and down in woolen underwear. Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, declared that “there can be no business as usual” and promised “we’ll come up with something tough.”

Republican candidates do not believe Power. They berated President Barack Obama for weakness and promised real toughness. Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, promised a preemptive strike on North Korea. Donald Trump was more reasonable. He declared that China had “tremendous control over North Korea” and was best placed to solve the problem quickly and surgically. Trump would let China deal with North Korea.

The rise of Trump with his megalomania, simplistic solutions and powerful populism is ruffling many feathers. In a Der Spiegel article, Markus Feldenkirchen declared Trump to be the world’s most dangerous man. Feldenkirchen is wrong. Like many decent Germans, Adolf Hitler’s ghost continues to torment him and makes him project German anxiety on American reality. There are more dangerous men than Trump and one of them is running against him.

Trump is a boorish bully. To use an American expression, he talks smack. Yet he is more like Benito Mussolini and less like Adolf Hitler. Feldenkirchen shudders on seeing Trump “vulgarly pursing his lips” and declaring that he would “attack head-first again” in the manner of American football. For Trump, concussions and brain damage do not matter. He wants America to toughen up and become great again.

Other Republican candidates largely agree with Trump. They are simply not as candid as him. Donald Trump is certainly scary, but Ted Cruz is terrifying.

In this week’s primary debate, both men were asked about waterboarding. Once, Uncle Sam deemed this practice torture. After World War II, it sentenced Japanese prisoners of war to death for waterboarding. Cruz was too clever by half and claimed that waterboarding was merely enhanced interrogation, not torture. He made a convoluted case for using it sparingly to protect American lives and keep the country safe. Trump boldly declared that he would bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

Prima facie, Trump’s response is crass, but Cruz’s is the more sinister. Trump is impulsive. He is full of bluster. Cruz is calculative. He is bringing torture in through the back door. Cruz is smoothly insisting that torture is not really torture. And he would use “enhanced interrogation” only sparingly for bona fide reasons. Trump is merely a chest-thumping gorilla. He is a modern counterpart to Benito Mussolini. Cruz is more like Joseph Stalin. Underneath his reasonableness lies a ruthlessness that is more controlled, doctrinaire and bloodthirsty than the comic book buffoonery of Trump.

The now chubby Cruz was a star debater at Princeton. He then went to Harvard Law School where he did well again and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Cruz played a key role in George W. Bush’s legal team that defended his victory over Al Gore in Florida. He understands the power of the judiciary and is already planning to install “rock-ribbed” conservatives in the US Supreme Court.

Cruz’s wife is a Harvard MBA who works for none other than Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that sees itself as the “pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens” who do “God’s work.” So many US Treasury secretaries have come from Goldman Sachs that its detractors see the bank as “a creepy, conspiratorial vampire squid of finance.” Yet this slick climber of the greasy pole has passed himself off as a rebel and is the darling of the Tea Party. Trump is a mere poser, while Cruz is a frightening plotter.

Like Marco Rubio, Cruz is a first-term senator. Rubio takes up extreme positions, including opposition to abortion in the case of rape, incest and danger to a mother’s life. Yet Cruz does so with a fanaticism that is more intolerant. He was one of the three senators who voted against confirming John Kerry as secretary of state. When Obama appointed Chuck Hagel as defense secretary, Cruz smeared the old war veteran with insinuations that he had received money from foreign governments and extremist groups.

For all his manifold flaws, Trump is willing to make deals. In this week’s debate, he talked about the need to “take care of people dying on the street.” It might seem inconceivable, but Cruz is more inhumane than Trump. This doctrinaire senator calmly took an ideological position. He talked about repealing Obamacare and did not mention what he would do about those who were dying on the street. In 2013, Cruz railed against Obamacare for 21 hours on the floor of the Senate, causing the shutdown of the federal government.

Cruz is not a fellow who brooks any compromise whether on taxes or on abortion. He takes a similar hard line when it comes to the right to own guns. Cruz’s chilling video in which he cooks bacon on a machine gun offers an uncanny insight into his pugnacious personality. Unsurprisingly, when The New Yorker profiled him in 2014, it titled the piece “The Absolutist.” Former classmates, fellow lawyers and colleagues on Capitol Hill loathe Cruz and use epithets like “wacko-bird,” “abrasive,” “arrogant” and “creepy” to describe him. Yet Cruz has managed to march on. While Trump likes notoriety and publicity, Cruz cares only about power and how to wield it to achieve his purpose. Cruz in the White House is a terrifying proposition.

In some ways, what is happening in the Republican primary is the smashing into smithereens the edifice that Ronald Reagan built. Reagan promised “reforms that will get government off our backs, out of our pockets and up to the standards of decency and excellence envisioned by the founding fathers.” He championed American exceptionalism, painting the picture of the US as the “last best hope of man on earth.” He talked of freedom of the individual with low taxes and less red tape. Internationally, he threw the gauntlet to the Soviet Union. In an iconic speech in Berlin, Reagan asked the Soviet general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open the Brandenburg Gate and tear down the Berlin Wall.

Yet there was a sinister side to Reagan. People of color in Asia, Africa or Latin America always took the words of this draft dodging second-rate actor with more than a pinch of salt. This man who gave rousing speeches about freedom supported the South African apartheid regime. At home, he practiced dog-whistle politics. He appealed to white voters in the Deep South by championing states’ rights, which was code for allowing states to practice segregation, and kicking off his election campaign in Neshoba County, where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers in 1964.

Reagan is now the great god of the Republican Party. Everyone swears by him. In this week’s debate, Ben Carson invoked Reagan’s 11^th Commandment of not criticizing fellow Republicans on the god’s 105^th birthday. The token black Republican in the primary was prostrating before a deity whom much of the world outside the US regards as racist. Cruz declared that Iran released American prisoners the day Reagan came to power because they feared his strength. Even narcissistic Trump paid homage to Reagan’s ability to make deals with Democrats led by Tip O’Neill.

Republican fixation with Reagan is nostalgia for the last era of American greatness. Americans talk about how Reagan humbled the Soviet Union and engineered its collapse. His sunny demeanor and easy charm are abiding memories for people like Cruz who were coming of age in the 1980s. Greed was good and the roughshod barbarians of private equity threatened the gates of cushy companies. Reagan came to power to “make America great again” and, in the eyes of his devotees,” he did so successfully. If only things were as simple as Carson, Rubio, Trump, Cruz and co would like us to believe.

The Reagan era has run its course. The Soviet Union is buried six feet under. An older monster is back. Increasing inequality is now threatening social cohesion, economic opportunity and political equality. Just 158 families provided nearly half of the early money for candidates campaigning for the White House. Americans are angry because the promise of the post-Soviet era and globalization has turned into the nightmare of low incomes with little job security. Rising costs of education, health care and housing have pushed many into a brutal debt trap. The rise of the Islamic State with its gory beheadings brings back memories of 9/11. Americans are now afraid of their own shadows. They yearn for a simpler era when things seemed safer and the country felt greater.

A deeply divided country is now vulnerable to the likes of Trump or Cruz. God save America!

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit Fair Observer and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

Is America Ready for Trump vs Sanders?

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In the case of Trump vs Sanders, Americans have a genuine choice between two anti-establishment figures. This could drive voter turnout in November.

US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are two very different figures, yet they share the same feature: They both oppose the political establishment that includes the media, the big corporations and lobbies, and most mainstream politicians be they Republican or Democratic. The establishment politicians claim they want to make things better for Americans—when they know this isn’t true—and that a thoroughly corrupted political system cannot produce the kind of candidates that truly benefit the masses.

In March 2015, Rob Andrews, former Democratic congressman from New Jersey, predicted that the final match-up in November 2016 would be Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush—the establishment figures facing off against each other. These are two rather familiar names, as both Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush appeared on the 1992 ballot, except that this… Read more

Female Genital Cutting: An Unknown Global Concern

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Female genital cutting is not restricted to the developing world—it is a global problem.

Many people have heard of female genital cutting (FGC), which is also known as female genital mutilation or female circumcision. They have heard of the atrocious acts of women’s genitals being cut open for cultural and/or religious reasons. They have heard of the health problems caused by the procedure, such as severe pain and bleeding, chronic infections, infertility and other equally horrifying, lasting issues.

They have heard that it is a human rights violation and that it is a problem in Africa. And they cringe. Yet the look of pity and sorrow that crosses their faces upon hearing about this practice is nothing compared to the utter disbelief that appears when I tell them that FGC is actually performed in the United States and that this practice is on the rise. How do I know it is practiced in America? Because I grew… Read more

Pakistani Support for Terrorism Risks Conflict With India

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By failing to crack down on all terrorist groups operating in the country, Pakistan runs the risk of becoming embroiled in a serious conflict with India.

In January, the complexity of South Asia’s security dynamics once again came into full view. The new year was barely more than a day old when a group of Pakistan-based jihadists slipped into a major Indian air base at Pathankot and engaged in a multiday firefight that left at least seven security personnel dead and wounded about 20 more. The attack came less than a month after US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of the possibility of “an unintentional conflict” between New Delhi and Islamabad sparked by a terrorist strike.

India places blame for the assault on a militant outfit called Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad), which is also thought to have played a role in the brazen December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament—an event that ignited a… Read more

Can Scotland Become the Saudi Arabia of Renewables?

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With strong government leadership and long-time public support, Scotland’s plan for a green future is underway.

Leading up to the Independence Referendum in 2014, one way Scotland sought to differentiate itself from the United Kingdom was through its environmental policy. The Scottish government published a draft interim constitution that separated out the government’s duty to protect the environment in a separate clause. The government also published a report that listed the potential environmental benefits of independence.

The Scottish government tends to be more ambitious in its renewable energy goals than the UK government. Scotland vows to fulfill 30% of its entire energy consumption with renewable energy by 2020, which is twice the UK’s goal. In 2008, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond boldly claimed that Pentland Firth, a region in northern Scotland, could be the “Saudi Arabia of renewable marine energy.” One of the most recent Scottish plans against climate change is to fulfill 100% of its total electricity consumption… Read more

What’s Behind Femicide in Mexico?

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Cancun’s unsustainable development process helps explain femicide.

On January 13, Ruth Noh, a 7-year-old, was found raped and strangled to death in her bedroom in a Cancun apartment complex. The parents were taken into custody, and neighbors said the step-dad worked nights and the mom neglected the child, since she regularly drank alcohol with different men in the apartment.

In November 2015, a horrific streak of women killings in the Mexican city included the murder of a 24-year-old female in the same apartment complex. During this time, alarm engulfed the tourist hub as five disturbing homicides of women occurred within three weeks. Four of the victims died in the city’s periphery and one in the hotel zone.

After the discovery of the fourth victim, the state public safety secretary, Juan Pedro Mercader Rodríguez, implemented a unified police command in Benito Juárez (the municipality that comprises Cancun) in light of the insecurity. However, Governor Roberto Borge stated that people… Read more

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Andrew Cline / Shutterstock.com

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