This is what I came here to say. And I will again anyway.
Trump knew exactly what he was saying and how it would be received. The Button-Pusher-in-Chief is all over the media again, out front and center, playing the misunderstood victim and staunchly defending the Second Amendment and Freedom as if that’s what this kerfuffle is all about. And voters have now heard “crooked Hillary” a few more times in the news to help cement that meme in their minds.
Trump owns media presence in this campaign, and that’s half the battle when it comes to easily-swayable voters.
Presumably because the news-channel employees have been instructed to ‘make sure this stays a horse race’—and the only way to do that is to keep giving Trump a pass on each and every new outrage.
But, yes. How refreshing it would be to hear the Trump surrogates be asked:
[ul]
[li]How do you explain the “horrible day” remark if Trump was, as you say, referring to Uniting the 2nd-Amendment-Supporting Electorate?[/li][li][To those surrogates claiming ‘it was a joke’:] Why do you feel it’s appropriate for Trump to joke about using a gun to solve the ‘problem’ of a President who appoints Justices Trump doesn’t like?[/li][li][To all Trump surrogates:] Why doesn’t Mr. Trump simply make a clear, unambiguous statement on the topic? Why doesn’t he just say “It’s wrong and completely unacceptable to use violence against someone with whom you disagree”…? Wouldn’t that put an end to all this? Wouldn’t that win Mr. Trump some applause from his many critics in the GOP? Why doesn’t he do that?[/li][/ul]
Yes. He knew that he was calling for her assassination. It’s of a piece with his recent remark about Clinton, “she’s the devil.” It’s an open invitation for some follower to do the Righteous thing and remove the less-than-human Devil from the earth.
It’s deliberate. It’s conscious. It’s what he sees as his only chance to avoid the humiliation of losing.
I think if Trump had come up with it ahead of time, he’d have done a better job with the ambiguity.
I think he literally just said the words coming to his mind at the time. He was gonna say it was too late, but then those Second Amendment Solution (2AS) people came to mind, so he said that. Then he followed it with his typical “I don’t know” to try and cover it.
This strategy has served him well in the past, so it’s probably just a habit he’s learned.
Now let me ask you this: which candidate is it who has smeared immigrants from Mexico? Which candidate has said that he’s going to ban immigrants based on their faith? Which candidate has outright fabricated claims that he saw hundreds (or thousands) of Muslims cheering on the day that the World Trade Center burned and collapsed to the ground? Which candidate has said that otherwise non-violent protesters needed to be roughed up a little? Which candidate has encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at rallies?
Sorry, but when someone goes out of his way to engender animosity, he can’t claim victimization when those flames burn out of control. It’s unfortunate for the protester and, no, of course nobody sanctions that sort of behavior – I’ve been highly critical of these goons as I have those in the pro-Trump camp. But to use Trump’s logic, Trump started it. Trump repeatedly incites violence, both from among his supporters and his detractors. And he’s only upping the ante. We already know that violent rhetoric leads to real violence at Trump events. It doesn’t take much imagination that this is extremely dangerous and that it can escalate.
I withdraw my estimation of required amount of reality twisting - I hadn’t seen the ‘horrible day’ portion of Donald’s statement (it’s not part of most stories, although it certainly should be).
I guess if I was twisting reality, I could twist it enough to tie the ‘horrible day’ remark back to the concept of the election of Hillary - but that is really going a long ways in parsing.
It shows that in his mind violence against opponents is a proper way of dealing with disputes. This is not the first time. He incited his audiences to beat up protesters. He said he wanted to hit the speakers at the DNC who said nasty things about him.
You just can’t do this stuff if you are President. This is exactly the reason the 50 Republicans called him dangerous.
If Trump was a Doper, he’d get a warning or get banned for this crap. Is it too much to expect that a presidential candidate not be a jerk?
It requires little to no effort to cast it in a negative light. The fact that there might be some ambiguity means nothing. If you were to speak in those terms in front of co-workers, you’d have the Secret Service at your door tomorrow morning. That’s probably a pretty good litmus test for whether something is appropriate to say in front of a crowd full of firearms enthusiasts.
How do you figure? Near as I can tell, he ends the statement by literally saying “that would be a horrible day, if – if Hillary gets to put her judges in.”
Speech that communicates violence as a form of political protest, whether explicitly or implicitly stated, is the lowest form of expression. It deserves absolutely no protection, and it demands condemnation. There is nothing else to say.
As a sidebar on this latest outrage, an interesting development in how the media is covering Trump.
I’ve noticed several times, most lately on NPR’s coverage of this story, that the reporting on what Trump has said will point out his blatant falsehoods in the body of the story. Not with some link to fact-check, and not with a pair of fair & balanced talking heads arguing both sides…no, they’re flat out calling him a liar.
Example: they said Trump “falsely” claimed that Hillary wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment, and added that the President has no power to do so.
