“One Violent Day”
I think we should take Trump seriously and literally.
Politico reports: Trump says ‘violent day’ of policing will end crime.
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
[…]
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately,” Trump said.
Here’s the clip:
The “950” issue he was riffing on with his thieves and their imaginary calculators refers to this:
Trump’s comments came during a section of his speech in which he falsely suggested you could steal up to $950 worth of merchandise without consequence in California — a reference to Proposition 47, which reclassified some theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Harris was California state attorney general when California voters approved that ballot initiative, but she remained neutral on the matter. The dollar threshold Trump referenced actually became law four years earlier, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
As the piece adds, “Nationally, property crime declined 2.4 percent over the last year, according to recently released FBI statistics.”
A campaign spokesman pulled out the typical defense: it was just a joke!
Asked whether the former president’s idea amounted to a new proposal and how such an operation would work, a campaign official said Trump was “clearly just floating it in jest.”
Well, as we all know, there’s nothing funnier than fascist rhetoric!
In all seriousness: this is not how any person with power ought to think and talk. This is purely authoritarian logic wherein applied violence is a main tool of the state.
Again, from Politico:
Trump has a long history of endorsing police violence, having said that police reaction to the racial unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “was a beautiful thing to watch.” In a 2017 speech, he said: “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
Of course, I have noted his propensities along these lines before.
Of course, this kind of rhetoric will land with a lot of people who think that it is possible for law enforcement to simply go hard after criminals. But let me stress that unlike on TV and in the movies, figuring out who the “bad guys” are and delivering some two-fisted justice is not so easy. Indeed, the likely result of any version of this, including simply allowing such rhetoric to motivate local law enforcement to be “tougher” will result, almost certainly, in the targeting of minorities.
Such actions will result in a lot of harm to innocents and will not stop crime. Moreover, even if people engaged in criminal activity are caught up in such brutality, that does not make it right or proper.
Or, you know, maybe the next time you are caught speeding the cops should break your kneecaps. That’ll make you think twice!
Let’s not forget that Trump also has repeatedly explored using the Insurgency Act to use US Military inside the US to go after protesters and enemies.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/politics/troops-deploying-washington-dc/index.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trump-wants-use-military-against-his-domestic-enemies-congress-must-act
And still, people who beat their chests about police and prosecutor overreach defend Trump and tell us that Democrats are the real threat. Or they probably just remain very silent on this topic or call out “BOTHSIDERISM!,” providing an example that is in no way equivalent (probably involving Fran Lebowitz).
One day of dictatorship plus one day of political violence equals Führer Trump for Life. (allegedly)
The fact that this election is close is a disturbing indictment of a lot of Americans who claim to “love freedom” but think all of this rhetoric is a-okay.
I am becoming increasingly distressed about this election. This buffoon belongs absolutely nowhere near the levers of power. And yet, here we are, just over a month out and close in pretty much every swing state. JFC.
@Jen:
It is not merely Trump though. Take away Trump and what’s left is a GOP controlled by the people who want to implement the various parts of Project 2025.
He really is going full Nazi. He’s got the Blut-und-Erde nationalism, the blood libels, the Dolchstosslegende, now he wants his own personal Kristallnacht.
Republicans really want that daddy figure dont they?
Steve
@Mikey: I thought the Haitian-immigrants-are-eating-dogs thing was a pretty strong “full Nazi” play, but he’s always finding more in this gamut to embrace.
Is this the same guy who said the police went too hard on the folks who attacked and invaded our Capitol…?
Maybe the violent day should start with felons. Or how about people accused of multiple sexual assaults, especially those who have actually bragged about sexually assaulting women.
@Kazzy:
But those weren’t, you know, criminals. They were much paler than criminals.
Just remember that it’s not El Weirdo saying these things, but calling him out on it that incites political violence.
[Author moved comment to Open Threads where it better fits, but the author does acknowledge that he was replying to something in this thread and therefore was not being a rude so-and-so by being off topic.]
Seems pretty easy to me.
See? Easy-peasy lemon-cheesey.
@DrDaveT:
I thought they were peaceful patriots just touring the building.
@Jen:
Definite 2016 vibes…but without the fatal complacency and hubris, thank goodness. For turnout purposes, much better to have anti-Trumpers scared and on edge.
Those tearful women who in 2017-2018 were regularly accosting Hillary and apologizing for not voting will be showing up this year.
@ptfe:
There is no bottom.
Love that Newsmax headline Trump: Kamala let in 13,099 convicted murderers, which of course is false, and NewsMax also I am sure knows it is false….yet slap that up there, cuz they know it’s effective and zero percent of their audience will check into the validity of the claim. SMH
I mean, we’ve already seen unmarked vans with unidentified, unknown agency, fatigue-wearing, masked goons snatching protestors off the streets during his tenure.
@CSK: Lots of people are saying that. Even here.
Same FBI
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday that the lack of government data on police shootings is “embarrassing” and “ridiculous.”
“It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians,”
FBI Director James Comey told a gathering of police chiefs that people who think there’s an epidemic of police shootings of black people aren’t well-informed.
What’s nice is that if you were skimming the various national newspapers, you wouldn’t know that Trump is more and more frequently “joking” about fascist plans.
It’s buried below horse race shit on the NYTimes, and I didn’t even see it on the main page of WaPo. Nothing on LATimes that I saw. Not even FoxNews, who I expected to be praising it.
If a Proto-Fascist says he wants to go all the way to fascism if elected, and no one reports on it, did it really happen?
Anyway, December 20th will be the 100th anniversary of when NYTimes published a blurb that Hitler was tamed by his time in prison, saying that he looked “sadder and wiser” and was “no longer to be feared”, so I’m sure they are good at this reporting thing.
ETA: off by a day — the reporting was on the 20th, but published on the 21st. I wonder if they will celebrate the article’s centennial?
@Paul L.:
First, way not to address the substance of the post Paul. As usual, you handwave away anything to do with Trump’s ongoing (since 2015) complete endorsement of aggressive police tactics. If any democratic leader in a position of power came close to his demonstrated behavior on the topic–including rolling back many Obama era police oversight reforms–you would be obsessively posting on it.
Second, your two links in no way contract anything within the post. The US does not have a standardized centralized system of reporting police shootings. Full stop.
This is different from Uniform Crime Reporting data, which, while not great, is at least standardized. And it’s been consistently collected for years, allowing it to be used to understand trends in data. It’s how we know that crime spiked around 2020 and then has been decreasing since. Here’s a post that goes into the details: https://outsidethebeltway.com/why-we-can-say-crime-is-down-part-1-of-2/
TL;DR: The data are definitely imperfect, but are also reliable for major trends.
As far as your final post, ho hum… as usual you go back to the archives and pull out a single story without looking into the context. From the second link:
So what happened to that pilot program? Unfortunately it was voluntary. And police departments opted not to participate (thanks to our system of policing, which vests almost all the power at the local level):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/12/09/fbi-police-shooting-data
From that article:
I will do some more digging to see where things currently stand with this. It would be great if this type of reporting program could get off the ground. However, the majority of power in policing oversight happens at the local level and that makes this difficult.
A second Trump administration would only increase this lack of transparency.
@Paul L.:
Oooh, did that backhand leave a red mark?
This is straight-up fascism. Full stop. Trump’s history (from the Central Park 5 to George Floyd to Jan. 6) suggests some type of sociopathy whether caused by childhood trauma or chemical imbalance. Clinically he appears unwell and I think it is time for medical doctors to press an alarm. Obviously, prior guidance did not anticipate the current situation. I mean, if Hitler was running for president would psychiatrists be equally taciturn?
I blame Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. What are the Obama era police oversight reforms? Investigation of cities where the FBI/DOJ releases a report but does nothing about the misconduct?
My favorite Democrats defending the police.
Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) condemned the “deeply offensive” and “deeply disturbing conduct” of a Anti police epithet “F* Cops” that “is harming public safety” for unproven in a court of law [guilty pleas don’t count] instance of police misconduct against a supposedly innocent suspect (Tyre Nichols) that biased media coverage has tainted by Republican witness Matthew Larosiere.
@Paul L.:
I am going to skip the weak ass whataboutism and get to the core of things:
I get this AND who appointed them? This is a serious question and one you have not answered in the past
Why do you absolve Trump from that blame? So you think he got a DOJ that he *didn’t* want?
And how is what they administered substantially different than what Trump promised and is promising on the stump?
Or are you suggesting that he is mentally incompetent when it comes to DoJ?
@Paul L.:
OK, it’s a Monday night and I’m feeling neurospicy… I’ll bite:
Since you want us to take you seriously, you are saying that one Democratic Committee Chair and a first time backbencher are (a) in positions of equivalent control over the DoJ than a former President and current Republican Presidential Candidate and (b) saying “anti police epithets” are equal to said former President and current candidate directly advocating for police violence?
Do you really, REALLY want to own that level of bothsiderism”
Also, in terms of the Trump overturned Obama police reforms, see: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/trump-doj-obama-policing-reform.html
@ptfe: The Haitian thing is a blend of the Blut-und-Erde and the blood libel.
The likelihood that Trump thought this up by his own self is pretty low. Dude recently watched The Purge.
Iirc, the first Purge movie was radicals against the upper class.
Question: How do they know who to beat up in that rough hour?
Answer: They don’t have to know. I’m not sure they even care. In Milan in the early 1920s the Fascist technique was simple. The Brownshirt “poll watchers” would grab the first guy to come out of the polling place and beat the crap out of him while screaming “Communist bastard!” over and over. When asked about the possibility that the victim may have been a Fascist himself, the head of the Milan Brownshirts just said, “Well, too bad for him.”