Why is Donald Trump the front-runner in the Republican nomination to the horror of many people? This is a guy whose venom knows no bounds. The New York Times and CNN have even kept a list of the 200 people, groups and organizations he has insulted and they have published all his obnoxious comments. He is now a poster boy for white supremacists and has said many things that make me cringe.
 
Yet many Americans love him for his unapologetic no-holds-barred style of politics in which he is not afraid to show the middle finger to anyone or anything. How can this be, since Americans are supposed to be sensible educated people? Are Americans who support him just dumb?
 
Among the many competing theories to explain the Trump juggernaut, I think the one that holds some water is that many Americans are sick and tired of two things; first the incredibly corrupt American political system with special interests becoming too powerful; second, political correctness.
 
The approval rating for congress is around 11%. Most Americans believe the American government is very corrupt according to recent opinion polls. 75% to be precise. There is a corrupt symbiotic relationship between big business (especially the bankers), the executive and congress. Big businesses finance election campaigns for presidents, Senators and Representatives who in turn pass legislation to advantage big business.
 
America has one of the highest corporation tax rates in the world and yet many big companies get tax breaks thanks to the senators and congressmen they put in office. Washington DC now has the highest per capita income in America thanks to the more than 40,000 lobbyists that live there who make six figure sums per year.
 
When Trump sells the fact that he cannot be bought and therefore held to ransom by special interests since he is already a billionaire, he sounds believable. A lot of Americans who are fed up of the corruption are supporting him on this issue and other things such as his tough stance on illegal immigration.
 
After decades of political correctness, many people are fed up. When they see Trump say things which they can only discuss on the dinner table, they connect with him for verbalizing the things they are afraid to say publicly. And of course Trump is very media savvy and knows how to spin and weave the media narrative to his advantage.
 
While his rhetoric is very incendiary, and perhaps deliberately designed to elicit a maximum response for and against, I am skeptical that he will do most of the controversial things he says he will do. I doubt that he will deport 11 million illegal immigrants or order the assassination of families of suspected terrorists, or even ban Muslims from getting into America. I suspect that to him all this is just a strategy to win the election.
 
The Republican establishment elites may not like him because they cannot control him. He has staged a de facto coup d’état. But they will rally behind him eventually because he will be very potent at attacking Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic candidate. The very tactics he is using to win the Republican nomination will be amplified against Clinton.
 
I don’t particularly like Trump but then again, America has done worse in the past with Franklin D Roosevelt (elected 4 times), Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Woodrow Wilson and George W Bush, among others. Roosevelt in particular greatly damaged American democracy by consolidating power in his office and intimidating his opponents, including people from his own party. This led to a massive split as many Democrats joined the Republicans. FDR even tried to mess with the Supreme Court after some of the legislation he passed was ruled unconstitutional.
 
Johnson was a corrupt president who has been implicated in the assassination of John F Kennedy according to some historians. Nixon was even more corrupt and forced to resign after the Watergate Scandal. He was prosecuted and only a controversial pardon from Gerald Ford his successor saved him from jail.
 
Wilson introduced the Federal Reserve at the behest of John P Morgan, John D Rockefeller and other powerful businessmen who financed his 1912 campaign. The Fed has been a tool of extraction of money for the banking elites for more than 100 years. It is alleged by some that JFK was in fact assassinated because he wanted to break the monopoly of the Fed by giving authority to the US Treasury to print money through an executive order.
 
Bush started a war with Iraq on false pretenses when the intelligence was not solid. He pushed legislation to bail out the corrupt bankers to the tune of $700bn. It was later discovered by Bloomberg that the Fed gave trillions of Dollars of money to banks (including foreign banks like Barclays) from thin air which is slowly causing inflationary pressures. Current president Barrack H Obama continued this corrupt monetary system. Money supply in his presidency has tripled and drone attacks have doubled and increased resistance to US foreign policy. Business policy has been stifling and many have gone abroad to manufacture.
 
If I were an American, I would simply stay home and not vote in the coming election.