Dear Donald,

Watching your traveling circus has reminded me of a common interpretation of Machiavelli's Prince: that his aim in offering advice on the ruthless maintenance of monarchical power is precisely to lay bare its devices, making his readership politically wiser and more inclined to see the benefits of a republic.

Though you cannot possibly be accused of anything so well thought out, your campaign may have a similar effect: one wonders if anyone will be able in the near future to run on a political platform of pure bigotry, having seen that tactic so monstrously displayed these past weeks and months. Your every syllable is so vile as to leave an aftertaste that will linger long after your inevitable exit from the presidential race, making all others reluctant to turn bloviating ignorance into the foundation of a political career (Mark Cuban excepted).

Clearly no one is more surprised than you are to find that you are being taken seriously as a candidate less than a year before the presidential election. This is why you must be forgiven for having no coherent ideas on policy, and have leaned heavily on the kind of theater that has been the source of your political success. Here your resources have proven truly inexhaustible.

It is only natural that you have had to raise your game, and escalate your rhetoric, as your campaign has become so very, very long. Where can a campaign turn after calling Mexican Americans rapists? Naturally, to declaring that no Syrian refugee, even a Christian one, be admitted into the country. And how can such a candidate then respond to the tragedy in San Bernardino? Inevitably by calling for, in the words of your press release, a "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

A few questions arise. Does this include American citizens who happen to be Muslim? Or people (like me) who are Muslim only in name? Does it include white Muslims, or only their scarier brown cousins? Only Arab Muslims, or also, say, Indonesian ones? What sort of religious test would be applied at the border? Of course this is all beside the point: your goal is to translate fear and hatred into political capital, something that you do famously, even by the very high standards of the GOP.

After your campaign, Mitt Romney appears to have the courtly refinement of a member of the inner circle of Louis XIV. His attempts at a politics of odious xenophobia -- through such threats as making the lives of Mexican immigrants so miserable that they would leave the country voluntarily -- seem so utterly tame, in retrospect. But noticing this also makes one realize that a funny thing has happened this time around: other candidates of your party seem reluctant to take a dip in your cesspool. Your naked bigotry has made it slightly more difficult for its thinly veiled counterpart to walk respectably amongst the GOP leadership. That is no small achievement. Tossed in a confusing whirlwind of competing prejudices, even Ted Cruz is willing to admit Syrian refugees--provided they are Christian.

But you may be doing even more still. It is a common and long-running mantra of Republicans, and the managerially-minded Democrats who ape them, that government should be run more like a business. You have given us a glimpse of that disastrous eventuality. A CEO is a person who has achieved success in a narrow field of endeavor, and, increasingly, extrapolates from that success an ability to excel in all things under the sun and to have final say in matters of public import. Seeing you in action makes crystal clear just how presumptuous that extrapolation is. One is reminded of the lines in the old song from Fiddler on the Roof:

The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them ...
And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!

Au contraire: after this presidential race, everyone must wonder if a rich man knows much of anything at all. And it will certainly be clear that unlike the world of private enterprise, where authoritarianism is celebrated as decisiveness, government demands a style of leadership ever-mindful of rights and liberties--or at least it must do so for so long as this remains democracy and a nation of laws. Under some conditions, a business owner can refuse to serve Muslims; but denying access to the country on the basis of one's religion is wildly illegal. Your latest pronouncement shows the importance of running government like government, and why in fact we need government to be skeptical of the public spirit of business leaders. Machiavelli could not have devised a better way to promote the core values of liberalism, something which, until now, has for inexplicable reasons been a politically difficult case to make.

For this, Donald, I thank you. And, in fact, even though I have said here that your exit from the race is inevitable, I wish very much that it wasn't. I would be absolutely thrilled to see you win the presidential nomination of the GOP. You've earned it: you seem to me the leader that the party has been building toward for years. Your success thus far clearly indicates that you are saying all the things that the party base longs to hear. Words cannot express how deeply I wish yours to be the face associated with the party for decades to come.

Sincerely,
Feisal G. Mohamed