I'd say the same applies with Clinton, so the two sides are equal.
Not equal at all. As I said before, in the Republican party, kooks are on the fringe. In the Democrat party, they are the mainstream.
Point #2:
I've already answered the first bit.
As for the rest, consider this... his schtick got him the GOP nomination. What does that say about the plurality of the GOP primary voter if this 'delusion' of his works?
Most people haven't noticed it for two reasons. Because it seldom manifests, and because they don't think along those lines. The Republican primary voters won't recognize Trump's soft pandering to the fringe because they have no connection to the fringe. It simply flies right over their heads.
Furthermore, its understood that a person's psyche, his personality, is set within the first few years of life. He was raised by Fred Trump, a man who attended Klan rallies and was, in fact, arrested for doing so. That man raised Trump and so, was one of the two (his mother the other) most important factors in creating the man called Donald Trump.
Okay, this is a reasonable point, but wasn't the Klan mainstream back in 1927? Most people gave it up when they saw where it was going, and today it is a fringe group with no significant support anywhere in the Nation.
There were a *LOT* of influential people in the 1920s who had jumped on the Klan bandwagon for awhile, but they grew out of it. Democrat connections to the Klan have been mentioned quite a lot, but never seem to gain any attention for some reason.
But yes, I can see where that would fill someone with misgivings about him. I actually didn't know about this, and I don't like it.
So I'd say he's got a better than average chance of actually meaning what he tweets.
Additionally, he has done this multiple times in this campaign (I think it's up to six or seven times just with the anti-Semitic bits, not even counting the anti-Mexican or anti-Muslim bits).
So that's a very clear pattern that's emerged that he's 'doubled-down' on instead of tried to refute.
And I've already said why I think he does things like this. It's not because he actually believes any of that, it's because he thinks his base of supporters do.
We cannot stop Iran without a full scale war.
Which should have already happened, and likely would have had we not ended up with an idiot running the country.
Without bases in the region for us to stage our troops, we cannot invade Iran. Furthermore, their nuclear facilities are built into terrain that, even if we strike them, it will not be damaged. The only leverage we have are sanctions and trade. Sanctions were tried for decades and did nothing to stop them.
If you are telling me that "it's too hard", then I will point out that it's not nearly as hard as it will be to recover from the usage of a Nuclear weapon by that cadre of religious nut-jobs. Under no circumstances should a doomsday cult ever be allowed to get their hands on nuclear weapons.
Ending them and opening trade has, at the least, netted us Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile. While they can still enrich uranium, it does take quite a while to get unenriched uranium enriched enough to be weaponizable. So we've set them back about 5-10 years, even if everything goes south.
I don't think anyone makes bombs out of Uranium anymore. They use enriched Uranium to transmute U-238 into plutonium, and then they make bombs out of plutonium. And no, we haven't set them back at all. They probably have enough fissionable material to make a crude bomb now. To start WW III, all they need is one.
And if it doesn't go south, well... it's like the prisoner teaching the horse to sing... maybe it might happen. But we've bought time to figure something out. Something we would not have gotten by staying the course.
Nonsense. Iran has not stopped or even slowed down. Only an idiot thinks those kooks can be trusted to keep their word. And Obama is that idiot.
Furthermore, they already have ICBMs. What they lack is a tested nuclear warhead (and beyond that, one that has been miniaturized sufficiently to fit on the head of an ICBM).
I don't think that is much of a problem. They have enough sufficiently talented and knowledgeable scientists to pull that off now. Much of bomb design is out there for the people who want to learn of it, and I don't doubt they have espionage obtained information that shortcuts much of the development process.
I predict a success on their first try.
So right now, Trump's the worst of the bunch.
Non sequitur. Your above arguments do not constitute proof that such a conclusion is true. You have not mentioned any of the objectionable things about Hillary, and until you've covered those, you can't claim objectivity in your analysis.
From what I have learned of Hillary over the years, Trump would have to have done some really really bad stuff to be anywhere near an equal footing of "badness" with her, let alone surpass her.
Most of our other primary candidates understood all this, but unfortunately, our GOP primary voter-base didn't care about anything other than sticking it to 'da man'.
And that's Trump support in a nutshell. They see someone who doesn't pull punches and who bitchslaps anyone who messes with him, and they like that. That he might be dog-whistling to the kooks, simply goes over their heads.
And I'm not willing to see the world, or America, burn for it. (Had we had any other candidate take the nomination, we wouldn't be in this quandary... well, excepting Ben Carson, the 'Pyramids are Granaries' nutcase.)
Letting Hillary get her hands on Federal power is far more likely to produce a burning American than anyone else.
