How We Grew Numb to Trump’s Calls for the Slaughter of Anyone He Wants
Is this what we’ve become, at this failing stage of the grand American democratic experiment?
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.