In this community, Ruth covers Convicted
Felon Donald Trump. She is covering the latest re: his attempted coup
on January 6th. She asked if I could grab some other stuff and
absolutely. So I'm just covering Donald with regards to his lies. Jackie Calmes (LOS ANGELES TIMES) explains:
If his lips are moving, he’s lying.
The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s 63-minute jabbering at a recent Las Vegas campaign stop and found 64
false, inaccurate or misleading remarks — one a minute. That mendacity
wasn’t even a record. A contender for the distinction would be Trump’s
64-minute August news conference at Mar-a-Lago that was more monologue
than Q&A: He racked up at least 162 lies, misstatements and vast
exaggerations by NPR’s count — about 2.5 a minute.
And of course there’s the final tally on
his presidency from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, dispenser of
those ignominious Pinocchios: a total 30,573 lies and misleading
statements and tweets. That’s nearly 20 a day, starting on Day 1 with
Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd and the weather —
he denied it rained, when former President George W. Bush’s meme-worthy struggles with a poncho clearly proved otherwise — and, in his inaugural address, about the supposed “carnage” he’d inherited. (“That was some weird s—,” Bush muttered as he exited.)
Trump has been lying ever since, most ominously in still denying
his 2020 defeat at virtually every rally. The dishonesty has mounted as
he runs again for reelection. Pathological lying ought to be a
disqualifier for the office, yet for nearly half the electorate it’s
not. Sure, shading the truth is a feature of politics, not a bug. But
lying on Trump’s scale is a bug, and a venomous one.
They see him as a circus act. A clown. Again, that's why he's now living in Florida.
“I’m
outraged that over 13,000, the exact number’s 13,099, convicted
illegal, alien murderers are now on the loose. They allowed to come in,
over 13,000 murderers, many of them murdering many more than one person.
They’re murderers and they’re out there someplace. … They’re looking
all over every city, every state they’re looking. We got 13,000 people
that are worse than any criminal that we’ve been looking for a long
time.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a campaign rally in Waunakee, Wis., Oct. 1
“Listen
to these numbers though. These are the official numbers. These are
certified numbers. … In total during her term, it’s not even believable,
she [Kamala Harris] let in 13,099 convicted murderers. Some of them had
murdered 10 people, some murdered seven, one murdered six. I’m looking
at these. These are stone-cold killers, and they let in people that are
worse than any criminal we have.”
— Trump, in a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., Sept. 29
Trump
has a shining new talking point — an outrageously false claim that was
ginned up by right-wing media and then embraced by the GOP nominee as an
“official” fact.
Trump
then embellishes the “fact” with additional falsehoods. Notice how he
said he’d seen a list and some on it had murdered 10 people? There is no
such list detailing the killings committed by the 13,099 people. That’s
just a figment of his imagination.
Here’s
the truth: Most of these killers are in detention, not prowling the
streets, and have been since before Trump was president. It’s false to
claim they entered during the Biden-Harris administration.
The Facts
Two days later, Gonzales tweeted the letter,
highlighting the number of killers. “Americans deserve to be SAFE in
our own communities,” he wrote. His tweet was immediately interpreted by
right-wing media and the Trump campaign as saying these killers entered
the country during the Biden administration and were on the loose and
roaming the country.
But
the letter did not say that these criminals were not in custody. The
non-detained docket refers only to individuals not detained by ICE. In
fact, in the same letter, Lechleitner told Gonzales that ICE’s detention
capacity was 41,500 beds, showing there was not enough space to house
these criminals. As of July 21, 277 beds were occupied by convicted
killers. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that ICE could not detain
people indefinitely.
So, with so little space available in ICE detention centers, many criminals convicted of serious crimes are shipped to another facility to serve out their terms. Some noncitizens on the non-detained docket may participate in the agency’s Alternatives to Detention programs, which generally track people with GPS monitoring devices or the SmartLINK phone app, but murderers would not qualify. A 2021 Biden administration memo made detention a priority for noncitizens who pose “a current threat to public safety.”
Moreover,
these “noncitizens” include people who entered the country legally with
a long-term nonimmigrant visa or earned permanent U.S. residency but
were convicted of a crime. There’s no breakdown about how many on the
non-detained docket entered the country illegally, but one cannot
assume, as Trump does, that these are all undocumented immigrants.
The letter also did not say when the people on the list entered the country.
“The
data in this letter is being misinterpreted,” the Department of
Homeland Security said in a statement released Sept. 29. “The data goes
back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the
past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination
was made long before this administration. It also includes many who are
under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or
local law enforcement partners.”
My favorite Lily Tomlin line is this one: "No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
I
love it more today than ever, because it applies so perfectly to how we
must respond to the campaign claims of Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Especially Trump's assertions about his role — heroic, in his vision —
in "saving" the Affordable Care Act and fighting the COVID pandemic.
JD Vance, flagrantly lying about Trump's management of the Affordable Care Act
To
start by summarizing: Trump did everything in his power to destroy the
Affordable Care Act, starting on the very first day of his term in 2017.
On COVID, he did everything in his power to make America defenseless
against the spreading pandemic.
Let's take them in order.
Here's what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris:
"I had a choice to make when I was president, do I save it and make it
as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? ...
And I saved it. I did the right thing."
A Sept. 30 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) appears to show former President Donald Trump walking through a flooded street while wearing an orange life vest.
"I don't think FB wants this picture on FB," reads the post's caption. "They have been deleting it."
The post was shared more than 160,000 times in two days. The image was also shared on Instagram.
Our rating: Altered
Experts
and an AI-detection tool confirmed the image is AI-generated. There's
no evidence Trump waded through flood water in the aftermath of
Hurricane Helene.
Trump flood picture is AI
Trump surveyed the damage from
Hurricane Helene in the battleground state of Georgia on Sept. 30 and
spoke to residents affected by the Category 4 storm, which killed at least 180 people and left almost a million homes and businesses without power.
But the image, which was shared the same day and shows the former president wading through a flooded street, isn't legitimate.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thursday, October 3, 2024. New details emerge about Donald Trump's attempted January 5th coup.
Starting with the news regarding Donald Trump's attempted coup.
Madeline Halpert (BBC NEWS) reports
on Special Counsel Jack Smith's new filing, "The new 165-page
document presents the
clearest view yet of how Mr Smith's team would pursue their case, having
tweaked the wording of their charges after the Supreme Court's
intervention. It gives details of
Trump's alleged scheme, including his actions when his supporters rioted
at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. It also outlines the
efforts of Mike Pence, the vice-president at the time, to talk him
down." It outlines a lot more than just that and, in being released
raises a central question that will get to in a bit. But let's all
remember that in
Tuesday's vice presidential debate, Miss Sassy JD Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Tim Walz: There's one, there's one, though, that this one is troubling to me.
And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump
refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don't think we
can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very
clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn't. One hundred
and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some
with the American flag. Several later died. And it wasn't just in there.
In Minnesota, a group gathered on the state capitol grounds in St. Paul
and said we're marching to the Governor's residence and there may be
casualties. The only person there was my son and his dog, who was rushed
out crying by state police. That issue. And Mike Pence standing there
as they were chanting, hang Mike Pence. Mike Pence made the right
decision. So, Senator, it was adjudicated over and over and over. I
worked with kids long enough to know, and I said, as a football coach,
sometimes you really want to win, but the democracy is bigger than
winning an election. You shake hands and then you try and do everything
you can to help the other side win. That's, that's what was at stake
here. Now, the thing I'm most concerned about is the idea that
imprisoning your political opponents already laying the groundwork for
people not accepting this. And a President's words matter. A President's
words matter. People hear that. So I think this issue of settling our
differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest
about it, but to deny what happened on January 6, the first time in
American history that a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair
election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years
later in the same boat. I will tell you this, that when this is over, we
need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the
winner. This has got to stop. It's tearing our country apart.
[. . .]
Tim Walz: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist
history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but
the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us
say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea
that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill
someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship
is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just
think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I
think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a
lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a
threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it
manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is
still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he
lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did
Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of
the 2020 COVID situation?
Tim Walz: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.
And it's even more of a damning non-answer as a result of the release of Straw's filing. Here's last night's NEWSHOUR (PBS).
-
Amna Nawaz:
We're learning previously undisclosed details tonight
about former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020
election.
A newly unsealed 165-page court filing from the
Department of Justice argues the former president should still face
trial even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled presidents have immunity
for official acts.
NPR's Carrie Johnson and former U.S. attorney Mary McCord are following the latest developments. They join me now.
Welcome to you both.
So,
Carrie, what do we know about why this filing was unsealed now by Judge
Tanya Chutkan, and what stood out to you as you made your way through
it?
-
Carrie Johnson, NPR:
Yes, the Justice Department made this filing in response to what the Supreme Court did this past summer.
The
Supreme Court ruled that Trump and future presidents do enjoy
substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts. But the special
counsel, Jack Smith, and his team maintain that Trump was acting as a
political candidate and not the president of the United States when he
allegedly attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
And
this court filing today was filed under seal a short while ago. There's
been some back-and-forth about how much the public should be able to
see. And just this afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan mostly sided with
prosecutors and released this filing with some redactions.
There
are some new details in here based on grand jury testimony and notes
that people like former Vice President Mike Pence took about his
interactions with former President Donald Trump. There's some really
interesting mentions of notes that Pence took about this all being up to
Pence in the later part of 2020 and early 2021 as people prepared to
count the electoral votes on January 6.
And there's some new
detail from prosecutors, who maintain that Trump himself was in the
dining room near the Oval Office tweeting on January 6 as Mike Pence was
in danger from rioters in the Capitol. And Trump allegedly said to an
aide who asked him about all this: "So what?"
So there's a lot of
new color and vivid detail about Trump's alleged actions and his state
of mind and his knowledge in those waning weeks of 2020 and early 2021.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Mary, we knew this was an argument that Jack Smith was
going to lay out, saying, even though Trump was holding the official
office of president, his scheme, as he writes in the filing — quote —
"was a fundamentally private one."
Just broadly speaking, how does he make that case here and how compelling a case is that?
-
Mary McCord, Former Justice Department Official:
He goes through all of the different facets of the scheme
the pressure on state legislatures, the pressure on his own vice
president, the efforts to orchestrate the fraudulent electors scheme,
and his comments not only at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6,
but in the lead-up to that, including public speeches and tweets.
And
he — and Jack Smith emphasizes at every step how many private actors,
private attorneys, and advisers, including some of his co-conspirators,
were involved in so many of these efforts. He also makes the point about
there not being executive branch officials involved in these various
efforts.
And he also adds, I think, some really interesting
details, to go to Carrie's point about showing his capacity as a
candidate. He adds details about, when he's pressuring state
legislatures, for example, and state government officials, he is, for
one, only pressuring Republicans. He never calls, for example, the
Michigan Democratic governor or secretary of state to complain about
election fraud.
He only pressures Republicans. And in those states
that are led by Democrats, he instead pressures state legislatures. He
constantly refers only to his own race when he talks about fraud in the
election and never to the election more generally. So, in other words,
claims of election integrity, you would expect to be calling into
question a number of different facets of the election, but, instead, he
focused only on himself.
So, Jack Smith really does paint quite a
vivid picture throughout not only the first part of this motion, which
includes this extensive factual recitation, but particularly in his
legal analysis and his application of the law, the law that the Supreme
Court laid down in Trump v. United States, to the facts of this case.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Carrie, I want to underscore here that moment you briefly
mentioned about Mr. Trump's reaction to learning that his vice
president had been taken to a secure location. Here is what is actually
written out in the filing related to that.
Jack Smith writes that:
"Upon receiving a phone call, learning that Pence had been taken to a
secure location, a redacted person rushed to the dining room to inform
the defendants in hopes the defendant would take action to ensure
Pence's safety. Instead, after he delivered the news, the defendant," in
this case, former President Trump, "looked at him and said only: 'So
what?'"
What else do we learn from this, Carrie, about the many
efforts Vice President Pence made to offer then-President Trump an
off-ramp from these false claims of election fraud?
-
Carrie Johnson:
Yes, we learned a lot about conversations that Pence had
with Trump, as well as Pence's aides, who met with some of Trump's
alleged co-conspirators, people we believe to be former New York City
mayor Rudy Giuliani, law professor John Eastman, and others who were
advancing these bogus claims.
And after they tried all kinds of
other efforts in the courts and with the states, they basically failed
at all of those things, and it came down for them to Mike Pence. And so
they placed enormous pressure on Pence, tried to signal that he had the
power to overturn the will of millions of voters.
And Pence wasn't
buying it. Nor was one of his legal aides who's testified before the
house January 6 Committee. And we get a lot of detail about that. Pence
basically says to Trump, why don't you try again? Take this — sit this
one out. You can try again in 2024. And Trump and his top aides were
just not having it.
In fact, Trump called Pence on January 5 and
the morning of January 6 asked him to be tough. And Pence was under
enormous pressure, as we saw in that period, but, still, he held firm
and refused to go along with this alleged scheme.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Mary, there are some newly disclosed details in here,
some newly confirmed details. Much of it was also known from the results
of the January 6 hearings. But the big question is, now what?
What kind of impact will this filing have on the case moving forward?
-
Mary McCord:
Right.
So now it will be Mr. Trump's legal
counsel's turn to file a response to this and make arguments in
opposition to Jack Smith's arguments.
So he has argued that, for
each facet of the scheme, Mr. Trump's conduct — well, first of all, for
his pressure on his vice president, where the Supreme Court said that
could — that's official, they have made a showing and an argument that
they can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing through the
evidence that prosecution for this illegal pressure on Mike Pence would
not create any danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
For
every other category, he argues that acts are private and not official.
And even if the court were to find they were official, again, he can
rebut the presumption of immunity by showing prosecution would have no
danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
And this is
something that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her concurring opinion, she
pointed out some areas that she thought were private and said if she
had — she thought the majority should have said so in its opinion, and
some areas where she thought the presumption was rebutted.
-
Amna Nawaz:
That is former U.S. attorney Mary McCord and NPR's Carrie Johnson joining us tonight.
Thank you to you both.
Here's ABC NEWS zooming
on Donald Trump insisting immediately after the 2020 election that the
actual results -- HE LOST! -- do not matter.
And
here's Chris Hayes discussing it on MSNBC with Lawrence O'Donnell and
Rachel Maddow and Chris focuses on the Tweet Donald used to put a
target on then-Vice President Mike Pence's back.
The released court filing (
here)
contains a lot of newly released facts and it also provides a timeline
of the attempt by Donald Trump to attack our democracy. There's so much
in there that anyone should be able to find new details and facts.
In the discussion above in the MSNBC clip, Rachel noted:
One
of the things that I never connected before is something that's
provided on page 63 of this document. We knew from Pence's memoir, that
when he was really making clear, as of New Year's Day, as of January
1st, that he was not going to go along with this, that all of the
lobbying of him was not working, we know from his memoir that Trump
threatened him and said that, "Hundreds of thousands of people are going
to hate your guts." We knew he had done that. What I did not know
before reading this today is that he's threatening him that hundreds of
thousands of people are going to effectively come after him for what
he's doing here and then immediately after he says that to Pence,
immediately afterwards, he Tweets a reminder to all of his supporters to
make sure you're going to be in Washington, DC on January 6th. I mean
when he makes that threat to Pence, he's already announced "will be
wild, come for January 6th," he tells him hundreds of thousands of
people will come for you and then he hits a reminder in Twitter telling
people that they need to show up so that they can make good on the
threat. It is just wielding the promise of an angry mob as a deliberate
threat and as as one that he is planning to make good on. And I have
never seen it laid out that way before even though I knew the individual
pieces and it just sent a chill down my spine.
And
as you hear about the filing, as you read about it, read it and/or
watch videos about it, you'll probably have a similar reaction.
Erik De La Garza (RAW STORY) notes:
“I don’t usually gasp at things,” said MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin during an appearance with host Nicole Wallace on Wednesday on her show “Deadline: White House," but added, “We are learning facts that weren’t previously known to us.”
“I’ll
read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” Wallace
said before going on to read from page 142 of the massive document,
including a portion where Trump reportedly responded with, “So what?” when delivered the news that Mike Pence was taken to a secure location because of fears over his safety.
“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news
certainly is news to me,” Rubin said, adding that the new court filing
contains more information than what has previously been released by the Jan. 6 committee investigation. “There is a whole lot of new content here Nicole and that is just one part of it.”
MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman took
it a step further when he called Trump’s actions after the 2020
election and in the lead-up to Jan. 6 the most serious crime “in
American history.”
“What you have here is chapter and verse over and over again about an
effort, a conspiracy – a criminal conspiracy – to thwart the will of the
American electorate,” Weissman, a former FBI general counsel, told
Wallace. “There is no more serious crime in American history than that.”
At one point, Smith details
how a Trump campaign employee was informed that a final batch of
ballots at a Detroit vote-counting center would favor Joe Biden. “Find a
reason it isn’t,” the staffer said. “Give me options to file
litigation.”
When a colleague warned doing so could spark unrest, the staffer replied, “Make them riot.”
Smith’s motion also indicates that the special counsel intends
to prove Trump and his allies baselessly invented claims that
noncitizens were voting in U.S. elections, and ignored indications that their theory that dead Americans were casting their votes was flat-out wrong.
The
motion further reveals that the MAGA politicos failed to deliver on
their own election fraud theories. They promised to “package up”
evidence of the election-stealing crime and then never delivered it to
its intended recipients, namely former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, where two prongs of the scheme have
resulted in sprawling election conspiracy cases.
Here are two more videos that should be streamed on this important topic.
The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus
election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was
fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If
the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the
expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court
in its controversial July 1 decision.
But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters
politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the
Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return
to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about
the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in
American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.
Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of
the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an
argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does consider Trump’s
status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings,
rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews,
grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though
parts of that could also be made public before election day.
More evidence could come out in coming days. A hefty
appendix accompanying Wednesday’s filing remains under seal, and the
judge has asked both sides to weigh in on how much of it should be made
public. Among the documents in the appendix are grand jury transcripts
and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong
investigation.
Donald
staged a coup. He should be in prison. But he's not our only issue.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon needs to be removed from the bench
immediately. Her constant delays in this case and her eventual
dismissal of it were questioned by other justices and legal scholars.
Now knowing some of what we do -- things Cannon already knew -- we see
that she worked to deprive the American people -- ahead of an election
-- of the details and facts that they needed. They needed to know how
the coup was staged, they needed to Donald Trump's involvement. The
right of a citizenry to be informed, to be informed voters, didn't
matter to Aileen. She saw her position on the bench as running
interference for the man that got her that post. She betrayed the law,
she betrayed our judicial system.
These
shocking things that we're learning -- and more may be coming -- were
shielded by her. She refused to allow the American people to know what
went down as our democracy was attacked.
Her
rulings have been questionable from the beginning; however, it is no
longer speculation about what she was doing. Her intent some can
argue. But her decisions and her actions prevented the American people
from knowledge they should have had, from facts they should have known.
She did not pursue justice, instead she worked to cover up a crime.
She should be removed from the bench.
Winding
down with Will Bunch. Over the weekend, Donald Trump advocated for a
lawless purge period attacking people in the United States. Many
outlets have ignored it.
Will Bunch covers it below:
This is not a test. This is your
emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual
Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.
That’s how “The Purge,”
an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a
dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running
film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America
that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely
alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure
about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.
And yet here was Donald Trump,
ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a
smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned
to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge
— treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st
chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake,
everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a
whupping from an all-powerful police state.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said,
even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a
long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed
to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with
refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed
the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day”
by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The
word will be out. And it will end immediately...”
Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS
News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City
Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times
executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and
screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...
And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant
— it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of
Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national
rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.
“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay.
“But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality
just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his
escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And
should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory
as the pressures of the campaign mount?”
America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.
Tomasky
and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants
were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday
rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic
because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry
of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic
cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of
murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang
members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and,
most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll
cut your throat.”
Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted
that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a
swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.”
Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames
of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a
vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound
like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What
different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s
actually happening?
The following sites updated:
Full Coverage
