Is anyone out there still going to argue Donald Trump isn’t planning to turn America into a genuine totalitarian dystopia? After THIS??
The Celebrity Apprentice star campaigned in Erie, Pennsylvania on Sunday and made maybe the darkest proposal we’ve ever heard from a serious presidential candidate. Speaking about crime, he lied and said it’s “at a level like we’ve never seen, it’s rampant, it’s rising.” This isn’t true, violent crime is down and falling. The trend has been generally downward since the early ’90s. There was a slight increase during COVID — you know, that disaster Trump was in charge of — but since then it’s been on the decline. That’s not a feeling, it’s statistics. Murder are down 23% from last year, robberies are down 14%. And the numbers in 2023 were lower than the year before! It’s a sizable, provable trend.
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But of course, it’s easier for Trump to whip up fear if crime is up, so he just lied about it. But the crazy thing is what he suggested as a solution for this made-up problem of skyrocketing crime rates. He said:
“See, we have to let the police do their job, and if they have to be extraordinarily rough…”
Sorry, what? Yeah, it’s what you think. And it gets worse. Trump suggested the solution is “one real rough nasty day” where there are no rules or consequences for cops’ violence. He said “the police want to do it” and are only being held back by *crazy liberals* who think police brutality is bad. He proposed:
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately.”
What the absolute eff??
Right away, folks on X (Twitter) and then even news outlets started comparing his remarks to the plot of the horror movie franchise The Purge.
In The Purge, violent crime is legal for one night a year, supposedly to keep everyone living in a safe, idyllic environment the rest of the time. You know, the idea people can *get it all out of their system*. Obviously the idea is BONKERS. The movies are about a dystopian society, not something to be emulated. So people are pointing out just how crazy it is what Trump is saying.
But we have to respond to that criticism — because we actually think what Trump is suggesting is worse.
See, he’s not saying everyone should do crime like The Purge. He’s saying the cops should go do crime. He’s suggesting police go consequence free and murder, maim, whatever — make it so bad that no one wants to do crime again. And that is horrifying. Once again, he’s suggesting something completely unconstitutional — denying citizens their rights to due process and jumping straight to capital punishment.
What makes it even worse is the racist context this suggestion was couched in. Trump also specifically name-dropped several cities that have a higher Black population and also continued his anti-immigrant rhetoric, saying they’re sneaking into people’s homes and slitting their throats. Sorry, but when you juxtapose that with Trump suggesting unchecked police violence, it’s hard not to connect the dots and see something that looks less like crime prevention and more like, well, a lynch mob. Less like the police and more like the KKK.
Like we said, to us that suggestion is worse than anything from a fake horror movie. Because it’s something real that unfortunately has happened in the darkest moments of our country’s history.
[Image via MassLive/Universal/YouTube.]
