I don't know. Do I care about this or not?
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.” The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.
I happen to be reading Max Boot's biography of Ronald Reagan right now, and Trump's outburst reminds me of Reagan's hardline attitude toward protesters at Berkeley while he was governor of California: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." Echoing Trump, he said afterward that this was "just a figure of speech." In the end, the only major crackdown he initiated was the People's Park fiasco, which he mishandled badly, but he never backed down: "It should be obvious to every Californian that there are those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society," he said.
His poll numbers soared. People might not have approved of what he did, but they loved the tough rhetoric. It showed whose side he was on, and most people took it as little more than venting.
Both Trump and Reagan gave voice to one of the oldest and deepest conservative tropes: Show 'em who's boss and they'll back down. There's shockingly little evidence for this—just the opposite, in fact—but it retains an almost talismanic hold on the conservative mind. Lots of people love this kind of talk, even if they know it's mostly just talk.
Of course, there are two big differences between Reagan and Trump. In 1969 crime really was increasing and there really was a lot of campus unrest. Today crime is down and campuses are generally quiet.
Second, Reagan, for all his faults, wasn't insane. With Trump I'm not so sure.
Even this Supreme Court might have reservations about the validity of a presidential executive order purporting to give state and local police officers temporary immunity from punishment for breaking the law and their oaths of office.
The reservations of the Supreme Court aren't going to stop Trump. They are going to stop some of his supporters, but not all.
What Yehouda said. The SCOTUS ruling on “cops free to do whatever they want for a day” will occur after the president-sanctioned mayhem has already occurred, just like the Muslim-ban chaos at the airports or the stripping of children from parents at the border had already happened before SCOTUS could weigh in on it. And either SCOTUS will rubber stamp it (like they pretty much did with the Muslim ban and the stripping of children from parents) or SCOTUS will rule against it… but the violence of police beating/shooting/killing people for one day will already have happened and SCOTUS has no army of its own to keep it from happening again. Can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Incidentally, this is why the Purge movies make absolutely no sense. They’re fun to watch as most Hollywood funded stuff is. But there’s no way people just go back to normal after a day of watching their neighbors torture, loot, rape and kill their friends, children or spouses. Resentments would linger on and grow exponentially, and eventually the sanctioned day of violence would lead to full out civil war and/or collapse of society.
"there’s no way people just go back to normal after a day of watching their neighbors torture, loot, rape and kill their friends, children or spouses."
Yes, they will quickly go back to normal afterwards. We've already seen it happen, in Germany after WWII.
Adolf Hitler didn't kill anyone. He just gave orders. The killing, the "wet work" if you will, was done by thousands of totally ordinary police and soldiers. After the war very few of these police faced justice at Nuremberg. Only the leaders did. But the ordinary rank and file killers just went home, got jobs, got married, raised families, and lived ordinary decent lives. Today most of them have grown old and died. But German society with all of these killers in it was not only normal but unusually peaceful by global standards.
Human nature is far more morally fungible than people think.
"Adolf Hitler didn't kill anyone."
Not true! He killed Adolph Hitler. And god bless him for it--best thing the man ever did.
Yes, they all behaved themselves.
The ex-nazis in the Russian zone went to ground and resurfaced as apparatchiks for the Russians and the ex-nazis in the Western zones did pretty much the same thing.
They behaved themselves because of decades of de facto occupation armies.
SCOTUS basically immunized Trump for thryong to overthrow the US government.
Is Trump calling for general violence? That doesn't seem comparable to what Reagan was saying.
That sounds like a stunt that would get half the force quitting before the gun-happy cops get going and get dying even faster.
This machoism confuses a lot of men who think they've got the biggest crowds only to discover that there are others with much larger crowds.
The thin blue line is thick enough to keep most officers silent on almost everything their coworkers do. Most stories of police malfeasance go back for decades before any individual cop feels up to exposing the rot within their department. Cops in far too many places are really just government-sanctioned gangs.
+1
Wouldn't the bad guys shoot back?
Yes
That will give Trump an excuse to send the army in. That what he is really looking for.
That will definitely make for great television, seeing the US army level the nation’s largest metropolitan areas that incidentally also provide most of the revenue that funds the army.
That was my question when I first heard of this idea. I wonder how many cops would survive the day.
SO the PD should beat the living daylights out of someone convicted of 34 felonies? Or a sex offender?
+1
Given that this isnt a one-off quote and the guy led a violent assault on the US government, it certainly should be interpreted just a bit differently.
More 💩 thrown at the wall. If it sticks it speaks more about the violent nature of his supporters than it does about him.
Trump openly admired Filipino President Duterte's instruction that police could engage in extra-judicial executions as part of his war on drugs. Thousands of Filipinos were murderered by the police, many for reasons that had nothing to do with the drug trade.
I imagine the Sean Connery character in The Untouchables is Trump's model of a good cop.
"He shends one of yoursh to the hoshpital, you shend one of hish to the morgue. THAT'SH the Chicago way!"
Although, admiring Jim Maloine might be at odds with Trump's identification with Al Capone. Still, Trump is nothing if not inconsistent, so who knows?
Actually, if they did this - it would result in a lot of cops being killed. The gangsters would be warned and would be ready for them.
"The gangsters would be warned and would be ready for them."
To the extent that there are actual "gangsters" out there, they would just lie low. Instead, the cops would just beat up a lot of people they don't like and whom Trump doesn't care about--protesters, minorities, teenagers, poor people, etc.
They certainly wouldn't be going after "gangsters" (whatever the fuck that means) or after actual open and unrepentant criminals like a certain golf-man gameshow host who stole a bunch of classified documents and kept them in a bathroom at his swamp castle hotel.
Like the Doonesbury cartoon when Mike is talking to an outlaw biker and remarks how well-behaved they are on the road and at stops along the way.
"Well, yeah, man. Moving weight."
"Trump Suggests Terrifying Solution To Ending Crime: The Purge!"
"The former president's call for "one really violent day" has critics shuddering."
"I study dictators and this chills me."
"For those history buffs out there - yes, he's calling for the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht)"
All from the Huffington Post's curation of tweets. Trump voices some revenge fantasies and it triggers these pathetic headlines and tweets. But really... no one cares. Everyone made up their minds long ago.
"So with all the volatility of the 2024 contest — its indictments, its candidate switch, its decisive debates, and whatever surprises lie ahead — the race has been a testament to fairly stable public sentiment and, most likely, partisan polarization."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/voters-have-barely-moved-in-this-wild-presidential-election.html
Good luck.
Shorter Justin: I’ll be safe here in my mom’s* basement. Good luck everyone else.
*I assume trolls have mothers and weren’t just hatched under a rock somewhere. Even trolls like the amoral monster Justin, whose mother should’ve done the world a favor by leaving him in the remote woods somewhere when she discovered he was born without a soul or a conscience.
You may have given up, that doesn't mean everyone else has to. If a candidate that speaks of revenge fantasies in his speeches doesn't bother you perhaps you're as much if not more of the problem than he is.
Given up what? I’m voting for Harris. And my vote in the state of Michigan is kinda useful.
"It should be obvious to every Californian that there are those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society,"
is the other oldest conservative trope, when the only things society has ever really needed to worry about are conservatives themselves.
Migrants, refugees, criminals, and trannies. This is what they mean by “destroying our society”. There’s a commercial airing in Michigan where Harris apparently supports trans treatments / surgery for prisoners. I have no idea if it’s legit.
How many of these people actually know (and know they know) a trans person. It is seriously an invented problem.
This. I'm convinced that the right's obsession with trans people is born in part out of most maga types being basically comfortable people who participate in politics as if it were a sport. Like, you show you are maga by wearing the team hat and shouting the team slogans and espousing a rivalry with the team's enemies. All of these things are completely substanceless and arbitrary, and hating trans people fits right in with that.
I mean, even if trans people were somehow awful (and they aren't any more awful than non-trans people), there simply aren't enough of them for it to be anything that anybody should care about.
If you have actual problems, you engage in politics about those problems (see, for example, the LGBTQ community advocating for marriage rights, environmentalists engaging to save this or that forest, or secure these or those carbon policies, or--less admirably--business lobbyists advocating for tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks on their industries). If you don't have any significant problems, I guess you can pick a team and have a good time getting all caught up in the fun of waving a pennant and chanting the chants.
It is a great point that the people who vote for conservatives have no significant problems or issues themselves and resent hearing about people who do, so they make up imaginary problems and ally with the highly motivated characters who cause most of the issues for other people in the first place.
Migrants, refugees and transgender issues are all about freedom, an idea conservatives are obviously against, aside from the freedom of getting away with harming others, the only freedom that matters to them.
"I have no idea if it’s legit." If not, you should. it's relatively easy to find these things out in the modern age. Here, I'll even start you off.
https://www.google.com/
Thanks for the tip. When I said I didn’t know if it was legit, I suppose I was wondering if she was just pandering or really wanted to provide those benefits. Though I wouldn’t have put it past the trumpers to make it up, in this case, she really did say it.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-world-wants-to-start-a-fight-with-harris-over-transgender-rights
So I do hope our transgender friends appreciate the shout out… though perhaps they are not happy by her lack of follow through. Oh well.
Sounds like Trump watched the movie "The Purge." No, Trump always tossed out ideas extemporaneously at rallies and speeches that address complex issues with simplistic solutions (I think that is how The Wall got started).
This is less a bug than a feature for many of his supporters, many of whom think that there are some relatively straight-forward decisive fixes to complex problems. Others know its a little more complex than that but like the attitude. Especially when it comes to busting the heads of criminals, who they regard as coddled by the Left.
I will say that as his cognition and self-control have declined with age, it has gotten a little weirder.
Trump appeals to people who click on those Internet ads claiming “one easy trick to….” Closing the Southern border will solve the fentanyl, housing, crime, etc. problems. Allowing the police to get tough on petty criminals will solve the theft/robbery “problem”. Building concentration camps will solve the homeless problem.
It interests me that Vance is running around telling evangelicals that closing the border will free up money to give those poor addicts like his own mom a second chance. In the past, the “one easy trick” to eliminate addiction and crime related to addiction was to supply addicts with pure drugs and thus kill them. I guess you can’t say stuff like that to his audience which consists of people who are or who are related to addicts.
Just like Brexit would free up billions for the NHS. How'd that work out for them?
"Sounds like Trump watched the movie 'The Purge.'"
Not really--instructing the cops to go apeshit on the citizenry is the opposite of The Purge. It's not as if anybody committing crimes during that day would be off the hook; instead they (and anybody else who looked at the cops funny) would be subject to more severe immediate punishment from law enforcement.
You can call it the "Peterloo Principle." Conservatives think they can use violence and repression to control society, but it usually backfires in the end.
Another difference between Trump and Reagan is that at the time he said those things about the Berkeley protesters, Reagan, to my knowledge, wasn't also A CONVICTED FELON HIMSELF.
A lot of criming could be reduced by finally throwing Trump's ass in jail.
> ...one of the oldest and deepest conservative tropes: Show 'em who's boss and they'll back down.
Exactly. When I was growing up and first learning about politics, I tried to figure out what principle unified the conservative mindset across the whole range of issues. I eventually decided that it had nothing to do with respect for the values of the past, or whatever it was the teachers said "conservative" meant. Instead, it was the value system of the playground (for boys, anyway): you survive by being the toughest guy out there.
And I could see instantly that if everyone adopts this attitude, it does not end well.
That fits in with one of the oldest and deepest conservative negotiation tactic: I've got a gun and you don't.
The problem in the US is that "and you don't" is likely to prove to be a flawed assumption.
Reagan didn't show such a contempt to the constitution and rule of law that Trump shows (all the time), and was not completely anti-honest like Trump. It is therefore very unfair to Reagan to compare him to Trump. There are obviously many bad things you can say about Reagan, but he is still a different category of politician from Trump.
This kind of comparison is helpful for Trump.
Also Reagan was perceived as a really nice guy and nobody including Trump's supporters think that about Trump. They know Trump is a major asshole, but he is their asshole.
The difference is January 6--a violent insurrection incited by Trump. Nothing like anything that happened under Reagan.
And that's the precedent to the next step in violence. Mass violence against anyone everywhere in the US is on the menu.
Maybe we should just take him at his word. That would be a lot simpler.
To adequately feed his insatiable narcissism, a dreamy Heaven on Earth for Donald Trump might be:
1) Declare nationwide martial law
2) Arrest and jail all of his political opponents
3) Silence all media criticism of him
4) Hold regular huge rallies where people fawn over his magnificence
Hopefully, he only gets #4.
That thing you're worried about (Trump unleashing fascistic violence on the country)? Kevin Drum is mulling over whether it's a big deal to him or not. Intellectually it is, but he would still prefer to not have to deal with it, thank you very much.
I'm kind of surprized that no one here mentioned what I immediately thought of: Kristalnacht. Comparing anything to Hitler/Nazis always seems hyperbolic and it is. But autocrats gotta autocrat, and the ways they do it from a little to a whole lot is always obviously similar. Probably covered in every PolySci 101 (which I did not take.)
Crooks and Liars has a string of different Xitters about this that are pretty good.
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/09/deranged-lunatic-calls-violence-rally