Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Wehner details the dehumanizing language Donald Trump pumps out at his rallies. A veteran of three Republican presidencies, Wehner writes that “Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does.”
[For example, Trump] has repeatedly attacked [Judge Arthur F. Engoron], describing him as “CRAZY” and “CRAZED in his hatred of me.”
Update: Trump attacked Judge Engoron and his chief law clerk at 2:03 am Eastern on Thanksgiving.
Judge Engoron, 74, an officer of the New York Supreme Court, is presiding over the civil trial related to Donald Trump having inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars [1].
On October 3, 2023, Trump posted the name, photo, and private Instagram account of Judge Engoron’s chief law clerk to his social media site. He also sent the information to his political supporters in an email alert.
According to the court Judicial Threats Assessment unit,”the comments made in [Trump’s] post resulted in hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages that have been transcribed into over 275 single spaced pages.
The threats against Justice Engoron and Ms. Greenfield are considered to be serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative. In order to provide this court with the seriousness of the threats being made against Justice Engoron and his staff, below is a representative sample of the hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages that are directed at the judge and his staff.
[…]
The messages received by Justice Engoron and his staff every day has created an ongoing security risk for the judge, his staff and his family.
Journalist and professor Bill Grueskin has highlighted the verbal attacks directed at Judge Engoran from Trump supporters.
Read sample transcripts of voicemails left for Judge Engoron and his staff on their office phone. They are evidence that Trump supporters mirror his dehumanizing rhetoric. How far is it from threat to action?
Examples (emphasis added):
A. You know. I’m not going to. Call you too many names… I mean, honestly, you should be assassinated. You should be killed. You should be not assassin executed. You should be executed.
B. Yes, Arthur, you are a corrupt Nazi …
C. Resign now, you dirty, treasonous piece of trash snake. We are going to get you and anyone of you dirty, backstabbing, lying, cheating American. You are nothing but a bunch of communists. We are coming to remove you permanently.
D. Trust me. Trust me when I say this. I will come for you. I don’t care. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me either. I’ll send every hacker in the world after every little file on you. And they will expose you. Any little dirty secret you have, you will not hide from me. I do not stand with Joseph Biden or what you are doing. I stand with the 12 houses of Israel. And in God we trust. Is the American way. Know that the blood runs red.
E. Do you think being a judge changes the fact that you’re a pathetic little ******? … I’ll be cheering on your death or your demise.
Trump’s Veteran’s Day speech may have finally gotten news media attention, but it wasn’t the first example of his dehumanizing “others.” And it hasn’t been the last.
How has Trump characterized immigrants recently?
“We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheny took to Twitter in September to warn Republicans about the danger Trump poses to America.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Today, Wehner is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. Yes, that trinity: “Contributing to the renewal of society by cultivating and promoting the best of Christian thought, and helping leaders to think, work, and lead wisely and well.”
He closes his Atlantic essay with the rare comparison between Trump’s behaviorial and rhetorical opposition to the words of Jesus Christ and his extensive support among White evangelical Protestants.
It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day.
The ends, those White evangelical Protestant leaders seem to believe, justify the means.
But that’s falacious reasoning.
English novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), author of Brave New World (1931) wrote in 1937:
The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced [2].
The road to November 2024 is a perilous one, one that US news media seem unprepared to adequately warn readers, listeners and viewers of its dangers.
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[1] New York State attorney general Letitia James brought the civil lawsuit that accused Trump of “staggering” fraud. Judge Engoron already ruled that Trump “had consistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets by billions of dollars.”
[2] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966 (Originally published in 1937). Quoted in Oxford Essential Quotations (3 ed.), edited by Susan Ratcliffe. London: Oxford University Press, Current Online Version: 2015.
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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