“She’s a radical war hawk,” presidential candidate Donald Trump said of former Rep. Liz Cheney Thursday night in Arizona.
“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
In an unsurprising bit of journalistic malpractice, The New York Times put this story atop its home page in the context of Kamala Harris denouncing the “violent rhetoric“. But at least it was on the home page, right? The graph in question: sixth.
Look. Trump just painted a picture of an execution: one to nine. Firearms “trained on her face.”
The Arizona attorney general has directed the criminal division to “analyz[e] [Trump’s statement] for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws.”
A year ago, PBS warned that Trump’s use of violent rhetoric towards his opponents was a sign of authoritarianism. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
[A]uthoritarians always want to do two things — they want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets…
And he started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don’t hurt each other anymore.
So now he’s going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that, in 2025, he’s got plans for mass deportations, mass imprisonments and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it.
It’s not just violence. It’s dehumanizing language. From August in the NYT:
In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “wack job”; a “communist”; “dumb as a rock”; “real garbage”; “a bum”; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, “nasty.” In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut.
This week, Trump called Vice President Kamala Harris a “sleazebag.”
Senate candidate US Rep. Adam Schiff: “sleazebag.”
President Joe Biden: “stupid bastard.”
And he continued his mantra of the “enemy from within.”
A float in Pennsylvania
In harmony with Trump’s rhetoric, supporters decorated their entry in the Mount Pleasant (PA) Borough Volunteer Fire Department Halloween parade with Trump flags. The coup de grâce? The Pittsburg-area float included a woman dressed to look like Kamala Harris “shackled and walking behind a golf cart-like vehicle.”
A racist Halloween Parade float in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania depicted Kamala Harris in chains being dragged behind Donald Trump’s vehicle.
This is where we are, folks. This is the sickness that Trump has unleashed, and we haven’t even made it to Election Day. pic.twitter.com/0Ru2MqyT0g
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) November 1, 2024
This is the natural result of Trump’s rhetoric. It’s been widely condemned but his rhetoric is the virus.
Thursday night, regarding Cheney, Trump continued:
“You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
You’d think from this statement that Trump significantly reduced military spending, right? Dramatically reduced the number of US service men and women stationed abroad.
Surprise! He didn’t.
As the BBC reported in September 2021, then-President Trump increased the number of troops in Afghanistan relative to the number when he assumed office.
He added 50 percent more troops his first year in office. With control of both house of Congress, he boosted defense spending in real dollars. After five years of successive decreased spending in Afghanistan, we had spent more at the end of 2017 than the end of 2016.
Trump’s nativist rhetoric — abandon NATO, sacrifice Ukraine to Russia — are definitely at odds in the traditional Republican interventionist model (see Bush and Bush, for example).
Trump continued his attacks on Cheney on Friday. He continues to make hand wavy comments about policy if he mentions it at all.
Expect his language to become more strident and violent as Tuesday approaches.
Be ready for an onslaught of fake media on Wednesday (possibly even Tuesday) claiming voting fraud. Don’t blindly share!
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The stakes in November have never been more urgent, nor the choices more extreme.
Remember: you are not voting for one person. You are voting for a team.
I’m voting for Team America not Team Russia-Hungary-North Korea.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com