The Escalating Slurs of Donald Trump

Donald Trump keeps raising the stakes. Back in June, on the day he announced his plans to run for President, he seemed to veer wildly off script as he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to plague the United States. It was such a random, lurid, unsubstantiated slur that it felt like a blip of derangement. Major business partners, including NBC and the P.G.A., severed ties with Trump. But he obviously knew what he was about. He was soon rising in the polls, overtaking poor lumbering Jeb Bush, and he basically hasn’t looked back since. On practically a daily basis now, he shocks a lengthening list of ethnic minorities, and the bien-pensant, while delighting his millions of fans. It’s tempting to tune him out. But, of course, Trump is the Republican front-runner, and has been for nearly five months—and each time you tune back in to his hammy, fact-free spiel, it seems to have darkened. On Wednesday morning, for instance, Trump was on Fox News vowing to commit unambiguous war crimes when he becomes Commander-in-Chief. In the bombing campaign against the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, “we’re fighting a very politically correct war,” he said—a strategy he considers a mistake. “You have to take out their families.” He said it three times: “You have to take out their families.” Even Slobodan Milosevic knew better than to talk like that in public.