Trump has always fetishized violence. Now he’s calling for extrajudicial violence to be meted out in retail stores.
Just days after Donald Trump suggested that U.S. General Mark Milley — the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — deserved to be executed for not being unflaggingly loyal to Trump’s every whim, the ex-president came to California to fantasize about more violence.
In front of an enthusiastic gathering of California Republicans at a convention in Anaheim, Trump declared that it is time for the police to simply shoot shoplifters on sight. The idea might have been straight out of the vigilante playbook of the Philippines’ authoritarian ex-president, Rodrigo Duterte, who advocated hiring the unemployed to kill criminal suspects, or of Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned on the slogan that “a good criminal is a dead criminal” and talked about digging graves for all the criminals who would die during his presidency.
Not that Trump needs any external mentors to fuel his violent rhetoric. Throughout his political career, he has fetishized state and paramilitary violence.
In the 1980s, the young real estate mogul took out full-page advertisements in New York newspapers calling for the swift execution of the (now exonerated) teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. In 2016, as a presidential candidate the now-septuagenarian Trump ginned up his crowds to chant for the imprisonment or execution of Hillary Clinton.
The violent fantasies continued. At one point during his presidency, he pondered why the U.S. couldn’t just create an alligator-filled moat to deter migrants. Later, in 2020, he publicly suggested that U.S. soldiers should shoot migrants at the southern border if they threw rocks, and also called more generally for soldiers to shoot migrants in the legs simply as a deterrent to scare others off from making the crossing. During the Black Lives Matter protests in late May and June 2020, he recycled a notorious quote from a southern segregationist police chief: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” During a presidential debate, he told the paramilitary Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
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