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Trump Closes Out Election Campaign By Threatening Michelle Obama
(www.huffpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Taking these ridiculous comments of Trump’s without the context behind them, singling them out and reading them strictly in the ‘neutral’ voice you’re advocating for… entirely strips it of the dog whistling that it is.
With a mindset like that you’d also say that ‘Trump didn’t literally tell his supporters to storm Congress on J6’ or ‘Trump isn’t actively exciting violence against democrats and immigrants’, and sure on the face value of most of what he says he isn’t exactly doing that. But, he knows what he’s saying, he has seen plenty of examples of this dog whistling of his getting the violent results he wants.
Each statement like this points his violent supporters in the direction of his preferred targets.
But there are plenty of things Trump has literally said that you don't need to reach. He has literally said he wants to be a dictator. He has literally said he wants to use the military against US citizens...
But, even those literal statements can be said to be hyperbole. So, the words themselves don’t really matter, outside of the fact that taken as a whole, including everything together, he is inciting violence against his political enemies and minorities with dog whistling. So, yes… he is threatening them.
Edit: it’s like those ‘let’s fight! Fight like hell!’ montages made of both parties during the last 10 years. For the vast majority of them the Dems clearly meant peaceful but coordinate protest, marching* and voting. Now, the Republicans may have wanted us to infer that it’s the same thing as Dems, but they continued to lay on the hate, attacks, and violent rhetoric without condemning the actual and literal violent behavior. The attempts to kidnap that democratic governor. Taking over that state capital building with threat of violence. Storming the US capital which led to the deaths of multiple officers and a violent insurrectionist.
Republicans are playing in bad faith and are both refusing to condemn violent actors (‘good people on both sides’, ‘standby and stand up’ or whatever that one was) are absolutely apologizing and watering down, enabling that and further behavior.
Downvote if you want, they aren't the same. There are big differences between this brief statement and the lead-up to J6, and takes like this only fuel the conservative assertion that "woke Liberals" will blow anything out of proportion. You can believe what you want, but I'm not going to resort to unfounded "but he could be" claims given how many valid criticisms are available. I'll stick to the things he's actually said about women's rights, the environment, locking up opponents, wanting to be a dictator...
The long J6 speech was held right in front of the Capitol where he said some version of "we need to fight" so many times that legal experts say it's obvious, in an evidence-applicable-to-court way, that he was inciting. It was preceded by many day's worth of rhetoric, and he was telling others to do his dirty work. It's the basis for an incredibly serious lawsuit.
The "hit back" conversation was like two lines in one anecdote about verbal sparring, and in context clearly wasn't him asking if it was his turn to punch Michelle Obama. He also never spent days calling for anything along the lines of "You folks need to hit Michelle Obama" the way he called for them to fight at the Capitol. No one is going to make a lawsuit about those quotes.