I haven’t see anyone else point this out, but Trump’s comment reveals what he really thinks about “2nd amendment people”. He clearly sees them as reactionary, violent, and likely to commit murder when displeased with the decisions of elected officials. He’s not above painting them with the same brush that many extreme gun control advocates do, except he’s using that brush to rally folks against Clinton instead of the NRA.
Trump sees nothing wrong with implying gun right supporters are inherently dangerous. And you see, the reason why the 2nd amendment should remained unadulterated is so we can keep these dangerous people appeased. Horrible things will happen if we don’t. Now if we were talking about any other people, Trump would be portraying them as terrorists and menaces to law and order. But “2nd amendment people” are allowed to be so angry and violent that we can jokingly speculate about them attacking an elected official, while still being pandered to in a campaign.
I see your Super pedantic nitpickery and raise you a split hair. Unlike Income or height, IQ is defined based on a Gaussian distribution so the mean is equal to the median in that case.
If Trump meant, "Those who are worried about their 2nd amendment rights being taken away or eroded in the future need to make sure they get to the polls on election day and defeat Hillary Clinton,"* then he should have said that.
*The word eroded might be too bigly a word for him to use.
Unlike most of you I think Trump knew exactly what he was doing. The ability to emit a dog whistle spontaneously is pretty so I think he must have planned it. And how can any sane person doubt what he meant. The only way to prevent a president Clinton from appointing the wrong court justices is up to the 2nd amendment people. And that would be a horrible day (we can agree on that). There is simply no other interpretation possible. And you don’t joke about things like that.
And the excuse that it was about “voting” does not wash either. Trumps hypothetical was AFTER the election, when Clinton would put those evil liberal judges in place. THEN, he supposed, the “second amendment people” would have to solve the problem. They sure could not do so by voting at that point. They’d only have one solution left then, hmmmmm?
Up front - I’m in the ‘bad joke that no reasonable candidate should make’ camp with a side of winking to the true believers in 2nd amendment solutions.
However, you don’t have to twist reality too hard to read the second statement above as a call to the 2nd amendment folks to get out and vote so that Hillary doesn’t get to “pick her judges”.
Twist it? You would have to destroy it to get that interpretation…unless you deliberately leave off what he said next about that action: “And that would be a horrible day (we can agree on that)” It would be a horrible day if people got out and voted against his opponent?
I hope the NRA actually runs this advertisement where they call Clinton a hypocrite for having secret service protection despite favoring gun control. Leaving aside that this argument is silly, it’s pretty easy to point out that it’s not hypocrisy if your opponent has openly advocated murdering you with a gun.
There is some truth to this but the problem is in the use of the word “strategy”, which implies a coherent plan. One of my favorite universal truths is “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” and it has many variants; in Trump’s case, substitute “strategy” for “malice” and it’s still true.
He didn’t consciously decide that being an outrageous, offensive blowhard was a winning strategy – that’s who he is, and always has been. He’s an idiot who emits stupidity everywhere he goes with the penetrating intensity of a foghorn and about as much eloquence. He doesn’t have a “Plan B” because he never had a “Plan A”, and he can’t help himself even as it sinks him in the general election campaign. It will continue like this – he’ll keep blundering around saying whatever he wants, and his handlers will be mopping up after him and desperately trying to spin it. At some point I imagine one or more of his handlers will quit in disgust or be fired for daring to challenge him.
If this was the case it would be a very weak and bizarre statement for a politician to make. “Maybe” if my supporters get off their asses we can defeat her? If he’s talking like that he’s already lost. You don’t take a statement like “we must not let these policies be enacted” and then qualify it with a maybe.
The implausible twist there seems to be to interpret it like this: if the day comes when she’s elected president, she’ll then pick judges who’ll ignore our rights. Now, I’m holding out hope that people who advocate for Second Amendment rights can work within the system to legally stop such an outcome – after all, they’re unusually numerous, and they’re single-issue voters, and they donate a lot of their own time and money when organizing protests and letter-writing campaigns – but if the day comes when she’s elected, why, then, such a day could only be described as ‘horrible’.
No, I don’t believe he had that in mind. But is it a minimally-plausible fig leaf? Well, again, no, of course not. But is it an implausible fig leaf? Yeah, I guess.
If Trump thinks it’s ridiculous to interpret his words as a call to violence, maybe he should tell his supporters instead of just criticizing the media. At least some of them interpreted it that way too.
And that’s what the current crop of enablers are scrambling for. It’s all they’ve got, so they’ll go with it.
The only other strategy they’ve tried recently is “Trump didn’t actually mean what he said, because he said that dumb shit in the primary. Please forget it now.”
Only for the most tortured interpretation of the statement possible, involving a creative re-edit of the sentence order, and a mental block of the “Second Amendment people” part. Read the quote again.
If Hillary is already elected, which is obviously the timeframe that Trump’s talking about, what are the Second Amendment people going to do?
If the intent of the supposed action is limited to innocuous things like calling their senator, or writing their newspaper, why reference the Second Amendment people in particular, whereas all the other Trump supporters (presumably also for gun rights) in the audience can apparently do absolutely “nothing”, at that point?
If the action for the Second Amendment people is innocuous, why is he only “maybe” , “i don’t know” sure about whether or not it’s a valid option. Why does he need to hint at something, if it’s completely innocent? Why distance himself?
Why is the “horrible day” sentence immediately following the possible Second Amendment people’s action, if it’s meant to refer to just Clinton getting elected/picking judges? Why is it phrased as “Future bad thing…but here’s hope for an action to stop it…It’d be horrible?” It makes absolutely no sense with that order, unless the horrible thing is describing the Second Amendment people’s action, and he’s trying to insulate himself from the logical result of said action.
Look, maybe one or two of these sentences, in isolation, can charitably be interpreted as “a jumbled mess of sentence phrasing that Trump just happened to be put together that unintentionally hinted at something threatening”, but taken together, it’s obvious that it’s a half-joking call to either:
A. Assassinate future-President Clinton, and/or her judges
B. Commit armed insurrection against the federal government, in the event a Clinton election.
C. Commit armed insurrection against the federal government, in the event of a hypothetical abolishment of the 2nd Amendment and subsequent gun grab under the future-President Clinton administration. (i.e, “pry it from my cold dead hands!”).
Maybe you can quibble with my inclusion of A&B, and maybe you can argue it was more of a joke than a half-joke on Trump’s part. But there really isn’t another way to spin this, that makes any kind of sense.
