Not that we want to defend Donald Trump but this is outrageous

Donald Trump is not, to put it, mildly, quite our flavour of politician. Yet it is necessary to defend him in this instance. What is being proposed is outrageous:

Mr de Blasio's administration was already conducting a legal review into the possibility of severing the many contracts with Mr Trump currently on the city's books. That review was opened after Mr Trump described illegal immigrants arriving in the US from Mexico as "rapists" and drug dealers during his campaign launch in June, when he declared he would seek the Republican presidential nomination. "My impression is that unless there has been some breaking of a contract or something that gives us a legal opportunity to act, I'm not sure we have a specific course of action," Mr de Blasio said on Monday, "but we're certainly not looking to do any business with him going forward."

An ideological Turing test in order to do business with the City of New York? Say something that Bill de Blasio doesn't like or disagrees with and never have lunch in that town again?

The test of whether a politician, a political structure, should have a specific power should be, well, how happy would you be if one of your ideological opponents, one of your enemies, had that power? And this isn't a power that we want someone to have therefore, is it? Our own opinion is that Trump is somewhere between a blowhard and a fool but he does still have the right to say stupid things in public without the government of anywhere discriminating against him. As do we all in our own moments of foolishness.