General Discussion

Nevilledog

(51,198 posts) Tue Jul 26, 2022, 08:38 PM Jul 2022

What Trump's Trans Jokes Suggest About 2024

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/trumps-america-first-speech-crime-and-trans-jokes/670954/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/9zdRY

*snip*

The contradictions in such a campaign theme are glaring. Trump himself is swept up in multiple criminal investigations, and a House committee has spent the summer depicting for the public how he incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and assault police officers, made no effort to stop them while they did it, and then bridled at being asked to condemn the violence after the fact, a dramatic affront to law and order. But then again, Trump has always been more interested in order than law, sometimes portraying the latter as an impediment to the former.

True to form, some of his prescriptions were nearly as chilling as his descriptions of violence. “You execute a drug dealer and you’ll save 500 lives, because they kill, on average, 500 people,” Trump said. He did not cite any source for this statistic, which as far as I can tell is bunk.

“If you look at countries throughout the world, the ones that don’t have a drug problem are those that institute a very quick trial—death-penalty sentence for drug dealers,” Trump said. And though he didn’t name names, he has previously admired harsh justice systems in countries that do not maintain fair trials or basic protections for defendants, such as Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines.

Trump also quipped that trials for dealers should take two hours, just before insisting, without apparent irony, that Americans’ civil liberties must not be violated. He chillingly argued that presidents should be able to deploy the National Guard over the objections of governors, which would be cause for alarm even if he hadn’t entertained plans for martial law during his postelection coup planning. His big new policy idea was tent cities—resembling internally-displaced-person camps overseas—on the outskirts of American cities that could house the homeless who now live in downtowns.

*snip*

We can't survive another trump campaign, much less presidency.