That's arrant nonsense. Donald Trump could probably round up half a dozen military widows, orphans and bereaved parents who would cheer and applaud his attempts to keep various M-words out of the country. That doesn't make him right, or immunize them from criticism once they have entered the public discourse. A point Democrats had no problem grasping when going after the swift boat veterans.

It doesn't make them special or immune to criticism, it makes them more appealing spokesmen for the Democrats, because this is what they do when they can't win on their ideas - use a sympathetic face to rouse emotion, rather than let the truth stand on merit.

He said he did not want any immigrants, he was called racist against Mexicans, and then when Muslim immigrants around the world demonstrated why they tend to be so unwanted, he pointed out that his policies would also have kept such people out. He called for specifically banning Muslims from coming in, after Muslim immigrants committed multiple murders in multiple countries, with nothing linking them BUT their status and religion. He said that only when it was topical. He did not point out how Muslim immigrants flew planes into the WTC and the Pentagon or set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon, because like the death of Captain Khan, those things were old news and not specifically relevant to the discussion at hand.

Why "even though"? Why do you imply he had less reason to volunteer? I would think it would be the other way around, that he would SPECIFICALLY want to volunteer, to prove his reciprocal loyalty to the country that took him in when it did not have to. I was born here, I'm entitled to what America has to offer. The Khans were not. They came here, were welcomed and allowed to claim the same legal status as any other American. They owed the country, not the other way around.

By whom? Prove it with a quote, if you're not a pathologically dishonest piece of shit. The only comment I know anyone making about him is to call him a hero on the basis of nothing more than doing what millions of other men and women have done: joined the military. Did he win medals, or commendations? Did he sacrifice himself willingly in place of a comrade at arms? So far as I know, no one is even asking these questions, he is being accorded the title of hero, without debate.

Trump hasn't even vilified or belittled the guy who went on TV and called him names.

For the New York Times, a paper explicitly hostile to Trump, in an article attempting to portray the incident in the worst possible light:

Mr. Trump told Mr. Stephanopoulos that Mr. Khan seemed like a “nice guy” and that he wished him “the best of luck.” But, he added, “If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me.”

Mr. Trump also told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times on Friday night, “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”

In a statement late Saturday, Mr. Trump called Captain Khan a “hero,” and reiterated his belief that the United States should bar Muslims from entering the country.

“While I feel deeply for the loss of his son,” he added, “Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things.”

There's your stupid empathy, BTW. All Trump did was critique Khan's words, he said nothing untoward, except perhaps excessive in its charity, about Khan himself.

Only in the warped little pea brains with a "four legs, good, two legs bad" mentality, that ignores the chronology of actual events. Khan was not rendered special by Republican mistreatment of him, he was only noticed by the Republicans when he took the stage at a political convention with absolutely no legitimate political credentials, to run his mouth at a man who had done nothing to him. No one ever said every Muslim was evil, or a threat, and everyone knows the problem, even without the context of Trump's statements, is the terrorists, and the susceptibility of the Muslim community to radicalization. No one is denying they include good people. The longstanding contention of Trump & company is that such good people are not worth the threat that accompanies them. Why does Khan feel so threatened by talks about terrorism?

And for that matter, who is he to state that we MUST prefer to have Captain Khan, than a terrorist-free country? It's one thing to say "We also get guys like my son, not just the 9-11 & Boston guys, not just Nidal Hassan and the San Bernardino couple", it is quite another to say "Because my son bears some superficial resemblance to terrorists, you are evil for wanting to keep out people who share a belief system with my long dead son."

Do you even know what a hypocrite is? It is not, contrary to the apparent belief evidenced by left-wing abuse of the term, someone who says things liberals do not like. Trump calls for keeping out Muslims, fine. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but he's only a hypocrite if he is letting Muslims come in where it is convenient for him.

Who says? If he's doing the opposite of hiding, why is he constantly bringing up his son, or using it as an excuse? His wife didn't say anything at the convention, because of her grief, but that grief did not stop her from attending, or going on stage. That's an excuse. Also, "responds with shame" is the act of someone experiencing shame. Assuming you meant he responds BY shaming Trump, you're full of it, since Trump has nothing to do with son's death, and Trump did not pull him into the limelight, his opponents did.

"Trump is totally void of any decency because he is unaware of how to talk to a Gold Star family and how to speak to a Gold Star mother" - that is the words of someone who is not behaving as you claim, it is someone trying to preempt the other person's right to be heard. That is someone without an argument, someone attempting to cut off discussion, in the context of legitimate debate about national security.

No, that is an amateur psychiatrist making up his own meanings of words. Trump's "bullying" consists of calling some long-dead low-ranking officer a hero, before saying the important issue is the government's failure to address issues of terrorism. Terrorists are killing people with a wide variety of weapons, many of them already illegal and highly controlled, and the only response of the administration is to continue curtailing the rights of the potential victims, while trying to bring more of their partisans into the country. But instead of discussing that, one side is trying to make it all about the other's failure to grovel to some insignificant nobody, who has done nothing to earn any particular respect or regard that millions of others have not also.
Look, how about you learn the language, before you take it upon yourself to judge someone else's use of it.

For the record, your characterization of Trump bears little resemblance to reality. He is not leading anything, but a political campaign. He is only repeating popular sentiments in an effort to garner support and votes. That is not leading anything, much less a movement.

"The people" are Muslim immigrants who cite the Constitution without knowing what's in it?

Then it would be really bad for him, if he HAD attacked them. That would, however, explain why you and so many others are lying about his rebuttals to their attacks.
"His own" being a guy who was attacking him for over seven months, before being trotted out on stage by his political opponents like a show poodle?

They died as sacrificial victims of a bullshit foreign policy, of which Trump's opponent was a party, and which he opposes. As Trump pointed out, they are only giving a platform to the outliers who are convenient for him. Lots and lots of people actually KNOW servicemen and -women, they know military families who favor Trump, or anyone but Clinton.

The real danger to Trump is that not too many people can be bothered to see what he really said, and will affected by the dishonesty of you and your fellow lying sacks of shit who assert that Trump is attacking military families, instead of pointing out that some military families are calling him names on behalf of his adversaries.

Do you even realize how nonsensically hypocritical this is? Because it is pretty much the definition of your position. You learned a term and are bound and determined to apply it, because it sounds like the worst thing ever in your tiny little skull, and so you cannot process any interpretation of events or words that does not accord your image. That is largely a "privilege" of the left, since you can watch TV, browse the internet, read magazines and watch movies, without hearing a single thing that disagrees with your left-wing viewpoint, except strawman arguments about the other side, or exaggerated depictions. You are so accustomed to this sort of self-reinforcing nonsense that all you need to know is that Trump spoke in regards to a Muslim immigrant father of a dead soldier, and you assume you already know what he said, and act accordingly.
That's also an absurd definition of privilege. The mental process you are describing is really something as simple as limitations on human resources to obtain information. What does it matter what someone else's experience is, or how something affects them? What you have to deal with is how something affects YOU. And who are you to say which one does matter? What you describe is a "privilege" in the sense that it extends to every human being.

Back in the real world, a hallmark of privilege is saying things like "Who do you think you are to talk to me that way!" Khan is the one taking that tone, not Trump.

And Khan is looking like a cowardly little shit, for claiming he is better than everyone else just because of his connection to a dead person. I neither know nor care what his reality or perception is, all I know, or need to know, is that he is allowing people to use him to derail all attempts to seriously discuss important national policy with emotional egotism.

For someone who is so handy with the narcissism diagnosis, why don't you examine Khan, who keeps to trying to make the whole thing all about him? Trump says that too many bad people are coming into the country with the good ones. Then he points out that a disproportionate amount of harm is being done by a specific category of those incoming people. Then Khan jumps up and starts shrieking that Trump is hurting his feelings, and calls him names and insults him until Trump's enemies notice and trot him out to make his groundless and pointless arguments on the national stage. Then Trump points out that he is trying to discuss security, instead of the character of a long-dead soldier, and now you are attributing all sorts of negative characterizations to him, citing as evidence the fact that he trashed or attack some people peripherally connected to a theoretical hero, which he did not actually do.

Then the Khans are just assholes. This IS a political situation, it is entirely relevant, and if it were not about politics, it would be a completely different thing. The Khans are allowed to start randomly calling a guy names, because he's running for president.

That's not divorcing politics from the situation, that's still running for an office. It makes no difference. Right is right and wrong is wrong, regardless of the stakes.

Except they didn't do that. They started sniping in response to his comments, and making objectively absurd arguments, like waving a copy of the Constitution, which says absolutely nothing to Khan's point. Trump did not propose outlawing Islam, he proposed controlling immigration, which the Constitution enumerates as a power and duty of the national government, and in doing so, pointed out that his policies would have had the happy side effect of protecting the US from a world-wide epidemic of slaughter by a particular type of immigrants, with whom the Khans chose to self-identify. No one singled out the Khans as terrorists or accused them of such sympathies. Khan came out of nowhere to make the rather inconsequential point that Trump's policies, in addition to saving the US from another Tsarnev family or another Nidal Hassan (or another Colin Ferguson, for that matter), would have deprived the nation of the services of his son. And he kept it up and kept it up and Hilary Clinton supported him, and had him come up on stage at the national convention to make his silly argument about the Constitution. And Trump responded by acknowledging the (theoretical) heroism of Capt. Khan, before pointing out that the issue at hand was dealing with terrorist threats to the country. He didn't go around on talk shows saying Khan had a "black soul," which is a nice measured response to someone advocating policies with which you disagree.

Why should he empathize with someone calling him "a black soul"? Why is it not empathy to care about the victims of terrorist attacks, or outright murders, which immigrants have committed in the thousands? The only thing to suggest Donald Trump lack empathy is your own prejudices and priorities, in seeing the voice of your party as more important and worthy. In the past Trump has been criticized for inappropriate visceral reactions to other people's sufferings, such as taking out an ad in a NY newspaper calling for the punishment of the parties responsible for a gang rape of a jogger in Central Park.

You have no business for judging his reactions to things like that, and to the problems caused by immigrants and foreign wars, and attributing them to psychological disorders on the basis of nothing more than an obsession with something you heard about in Psych 101. Maybe it's about his ego, and maybe it's about feeling really bad for the victims. You might contend that his immigration positions are simply pandering to popular sentiments, but how is Trump the only one to clue into this, unless maybe he has a greater capacity for empathy than a bunch of career politicians?

It doesn't matter what his behavior is, you have committed yourself to your ridiculous narcissism diagnosis, and anything he says or does is filtered through that. For all your certainty about how wrong Trump is on this issue, I notice there is no citation of specifics, merely vague references that are inaccurate characterizations. That's all I'm seeing in this thread - vague assertions that Trump committed an offense of a particular category, rather than citing wrongful words he said or wrote. This is just gossip trying to muddy his name and perpetuate an image, rather than determine or uphold the truth.

And just as stupid, pointless and inappropriate as Khan's arguments. A reference you have to explicitly explain is a useless reference.

If Trump loses, it is going to be because a total and unabashed media bias persists in maintaining a completely mendacious narrative, and ego-centric grandstanders like you refuse to look at any sort of facts, and keep maintaining a lie on the grounds that ends justify the means, that what you want is more important than the truth.