No Shame

Donald Trump has never been shy about his Islamophobia. He made a number of shockingly hateful anti-Muslim comments during his campaign and has not let up since becoming President.

His immigration ban was also a thinly veiled attempt to ban Muslims from entering the country. A number of federal courts used his own hateful Islamophobic comments in the past to block the measure as a blatant piece of discrimination and intolerance.

And now Trump is traveling to Saudi Arabia to lecture people about how he knows to be a better Muslim. Or maybe you could call the speech "Donald's Tips for Making Hateful People Like Me Hate You Less."

The speech is being billed by the White House as Trump's attempt to encourage Muslims to turn away from extremism and toward a more moderate and tolerant stance. The Administration has not announced that it's being written by one of the most stridently anti-Muslim members of his staff, Stephen Miller.

I imagine Saudi leaders will sit stone-faced through his presentation because they want the military equipment the US will give them. Saudi Arabia has a fairly tight national security force so there's not likely to be much civil unrest there.

How the rest of the Middle East will react is anybody's guess.

A lot of pundits and columnists have written about this forthcoming speech, but none of them have yet addressed the glaring hypocrisy in Trump's ranting about religious extremism.

Trump thinks Islam should avoid extremism yet he is perfectly happy to embrace Christian extremists and include many of them on his staff. You could even call his Vice President, Michael Pence, a religious extremist with his stridently anti-LGBT and anti-civil rights stance.

The man has no shame.