"Tremendous"

So there’s a petition to deny Donald Trump from being received by the Queen as part of State visit to the United Kingdom. It reads “Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his capacity as head of the US Government, but he should not be invited to make an official State visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty The Queen.” One has to be somewhat naive to miss the several levels of irony associated with this. Aside from the fact that Prince Phillip has been doing pretty much just this throughout the course of the royal marriage, what precisely would it say about us should we choose to take such a course? Trump is probably mentally ill, and clearly he is unfit to hold high office. Any office, for that matter. He is dangerous not by virtue of the fact that he is evil, but rather because he is so chronically inept on so many levels. You do not have to be evil to do a great deal of harm. Cue my obligatory dig at religious belief; a mostly sincere and well intentioned endeavour that has caused huge tribulation and entirely avoidable suffering through the centuries. And no, I am not comparing Trump to the average Christian. I’m just merely highlighting where a casual disregard for truth and brute facts gets you. But I digress. Concerning his ill conceived vetting policy, which appears to be a classic example of taking a gun to a knife fight. Of course we need to be vigilant; of course borders need to be protected. But a carte blanch approach to an entire demographic isn’t going to solve this problem. It will however increase it exponentially, creating additional ill feeling and possibly an increase in tensions. I happen to think that should we refuse Trump his State visit to the United Kingdom we do ourselves an immense disservice. We just tacitly mimic a thing we loathe, even though I expect many would offer some kind of rationale as to why we could justify this. I’m for treating him in accordance to the values that differentiate us from his inane and consistent non thinking. Whilst I don’t think for a second that he has the capacity to see very far beyond his own glass ego, we can still disagree, we can still voice dissent. But let’s not stoop to the same level as this giant orange skinned ignoramus. I think we can do better than that. And I think we owe it ourselves to do so.