Trump Proposes a ‘Really Violent Day’
Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
It’s easy to become inured to Donald Trump’s bloviating. The man’s rotting brain produces a perpetual stream of falsehoods and half-truths, and it’s hard to keep track of everything, let alone find the energy to keep up the constant outrage he evokes–especially when the mainstream press does not hold Donald Trump to the same standards they hold everyone else to. But this is outrageous, a presidential candidate just called for widespread police violence. This should be a major story.
Trump says his idea for stopping crime is to allow for “one really violent day”: “One rough hour, and I mean real rough…” pic.twitter.com/6XeVXL6R8b
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 29, 2024
As of this writing, writeups about this section of the speech from The Washington Post and The New York Times are published, but only WaPo‘s is on the front page. Both headlines, in the classic mainstream style towards Trump, soften what he said and the NYT even positions Kamala Harris as the subject of their headline, while WaPo speaks about Trump’s “false claims” about immigrants from this speech without ever quoting his line calling for widespread violence against them.
This is a textbook example of how the press runs interference for Trump and downplays the actual words he says. If Kamala Harris called for a day of widespread police violence, you can guarantee the mainstream press would turn it into a ten-alarm fire at the top of all their homepages, but the special set of rules they have made for Trump ensure that he can say incendiary stuff that makes the Hitler comparisons accurate, and the NYT will still write a headline around his “really violent day” quote like “After Harris calls for a crackdown on fentanyl, Trump twists her position.”
Some have humorously pointed out that Trump basically pitched The Purge, a movie franchise centered around a day of violence, but as a Jew I don’t see any humor here–I see Kristallnacht in this suggestion. Trump and JD Vance have already tried to incite a pogrom against Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrant community, and this is a continuation of that effort. Trump wants to terrorize immigrant communities across the country, inflicting widespread extrajudicial violence in defiance of over a quarter-millennia of American law.
And the NYT and Washington Post can’t even be bothered to quote Trump in their titles (or in the case of WaPo, even quote him in the article itself). The Wall Street Journal follows WaPo‘s lead, saying that Trump “amps up his rhetoric” while leaving out the most incendiary quote from his speech proving that title to be true. Quoting Trump accurately all the time would mean the press’s gravy train is over, as the debate proved yet again that when normal voters come into contact with unvarnished Trump, they generally recoil in horror. The image of him portrayed through the media is very different and far less threatening from what he presents himself to be, and the softer portrait the press paints of him is one of his biggest assets in his bid to make America a worse place to live for everyone who is not an old white man.
Trump wants to incite a mass day of violence against some of America’s most marginalized communities, but if you took him at WaPo‘s word, he’s just making more “false claims” while he “lambastes immigrants.” Trump is openly calling for extrajudicial violence, and any journalist who cannot bring themselves to quote him accurately is no journalist at all.