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!
