I think real solution here isn’t to shame Trump – he cannot be shamed. The real pressure is to raise the stakes, to put the pressure on the republican party and even the libertarians who support the NRA.
There needs to be a coordinated effort in which we say: We’re documenting this now. We will hold you accountable for any violence that occurs to anyone, whether it’s to one of our candidates, to supporters, or anyone else. The pressure needs to be public, the refrain constant.
In all honesty, Trump is probably a one-year phenomenon. The tea party, the Trumpists, the conspiracy theorists, the Alex Joneses, the Sean Hannities, the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O’Reillys, Ann Coulters, Michelle Malkins, Mark Levins…this is all part of a long trend that has removed boundaries on what qualifies for appropriate and sane political discourse. If this were 1788, they would be the perfect argument AGAINST the First Amendment. It is the republican party and the right wing noise apparatus that must be taken down more than Trump, who probably wouldn’t exist if we had had more civil and principled conservatives all along.
As I see it, the problem isn’t true conservatism. I’ve never considered myself conservatism’s natural enemy. As I’ve remarked before, conservatism in its purest form is simply the preservation of values and approaches to governing and managing society that are known to work. When it works well, conservatism is a check against the unrealistic idealism of the Left.
Maybe Trump wants the 2nd Amendment people to stop her by arresting her so she can be tried for her crimes since our wimpy FBI/Justice Department won’t due to collusion?
I remember her saying this and found it extremely gross and indefensible. Good reminder that Hillary isn’t above saying irresponsible things, too.
Trump remarks are disgraceful not just because they can be seen as him egging on violence against Hillary, but because, as I pointed out earlier, he is pandering to the very same people who would be doing this violence. The winking and nodding is disgusting because it highlights how his campaign celebrates reactionary violence when it’s perpetrated by so-called patriots (AKA disgruntled white men who keep Trump shrines in their man caves), but in the same breath, excoriates others for merely protesting the erosion of their civil liberties.
Four or seven of Trump’s handpicked supporters, seated behind him, laughed with varying degrees of discomfort on their faces.
They took it as a joke. A sick joke about assassination makes sense. A joke about 2nd amendment types voting against Clinton… well, it’s beyond clunky. And Trump has a natural sense for oratorical humor.
Calm down, guys. I get the outrage but this was clearly a joke. Sure, in extremely bad taste and highly dangerous but surely nobody believes he was serious. He realized he’d gone too far straight away and tried to back-pedal with the ‘horrible’ comment’.
This is Trump being Trump, a total idiot. The media are playing this up as if he’d ordered up a hit on Hillary on national TV.
“Trump has not had meetings” and “Trump’s campaign has had meetings” might both be true. Did the Secret Service specifically say they talked to DJT himself?
Yes, one can interpret the statement as meaning that Trump wants to motivate Second Amendment supporters to get out and vote. One can also interpret it as meaning that chocolate is Trump’s favorite flavor of ice cream. The problem with both interpretations is that neither one corresponds at all to what he actually said.
And I don’t usually make comparisons like this, but I’ll say it now: Trump is a fascist. And that scares the bajeebers out of me. No, it doesn’t scare me because of how evil it means Trump is: I already knew that. It scares me because I know, from the example of history, that fascists can win. What happened in Germany, and Italy, and Japan, and Spain, can happen here, too. And this is the start of what it looks like.
Being a jerk is irrelevant to being a candidate or even the president. We’ve had slave owning and rapist presidents. Saying something controversial is minor league at best.
Trump is not the problem. Hitler would have been nothing without the German people. So the question is how do you properly reeducate the people to be immune to populists?
Wasn’t Jefferson a rapist? Can a slave give consent? And the point was that as history has shown the standards for president, senator, governor, or mayor aren’t that high.