In my years as a political correspondent, I’ve tried not to address my news outlet’s audience in the first person unless I’m so monumentally pissed off that I can’t help it. The president of the United States proudly, repeatedly endorsing the slaughter of six duly elected American politicians this week – simply because those Democratic representatives and senators hurt his feelings – rises to the level.
The fact that a former debauched game-show host, who is somehow once again the sitting US president, can do that, and have it register in our national consciousness and media not as a presidency-ending scandal but as just another Thursday, is a profound indictment of us all.
The actual president falsely claimed in a series of posts on his social-media site that this was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS” and mused about whether he should “LOCK THEM UP.” He then bellowed that the so-called “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR” was in fact “punishable by DEATH!” Donald Trump then promoted a user who posted: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”
Younger readers of Zeteo won’t be penalized for never knowing a time – as do older millennials such as myself – when our president was not allowed to do these things, not if the president wanted to remain the leader of nominally free people. It’s sick. It is depraved. It is a history-books level of shameful.