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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.
His appeal to his followers is that he "says it like it is". He wants you to believe he is being literal, so there is no reason to think those statements were hyperbolic. It would be pretty easy to attack his lack of internal consistency if he tried to claim that. Come to think of it, that probably should have been their line of attack the whole time.