Hitler moment
Oh, god.
This is very disturbing. https://t.co/qKY5tLwk9K
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) May 9, 2019
At his rally tonight, Trump says the government is unable to violently attack immigrants, someone in the crowd shouted "Shoot them!"
The crowd & Trump erupt in laughter & cheers. Trump says, "Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement."pic.twitter.com/SgQd2OH9ti
— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 9, 2019
Watch the clip. Watch the clip to see and hear his glee, his smirking grinning joy.
Look at his face as he says it. Look at his face. Look at his fucking face.
I know, it hurts at the best of times.
But we all know what that expression means. It means “we’re all thinking that and it’s totally the right thing to do, but we’re not allowed to say it.”
Three things:
1. We are not all thinking that.
2. You absolutely are allowed to say it, but you’re a terrible person if you do and you know it.
3. Hence the expression: “*shrug*, what can I do? we all want to kill all Mexicans, right? But this PC-gone-mad culture makes it slightly inconvenient, not that I’ll let that stop us.
I’ve just finished reading an uncomfortable article by an American gentleman about how horribly racist the Brits are and so they should stop saying that Americans are racist. We are horribly racist, still, and we do need to get our house in order but fuck me your actual president is in fits of laughter over the idea of shooting people who are brown. Fuck off, article that I can no longer find the link to.
I know. I know. He’s pulled us all into the muck with him. I can’t stand it!
The more I watch that clip, the more I’m convinced that the ‘shoot ’em’ shouter is a plant.
Why?
Trump looks like he’s expecting it, and he manages to not only hear the shout amid the general noise (I’ve watched it several times and can barely isolate ‘shoot ’em’ from the background noise) but also appears to immediately look directly at whoever shouted, which is easy to do in a crowd if the heckling is ongoing but not so easy to locate a heckler after the heckle.
If he wanted to tacitly approve the idea of shooting immigrants, what better way to raise the subject?
A plant in the audience would be consistent with Maria Butina planted in the audience (2015) so Trump could call on her to ask him about sanctions.
Also consider Trump on the phone posing as “John Barron” (1980s) and “John Miller” (1991).
It’s a trick — it’s not Trump saying something, it’s what “people are saying.”
There is also the fact that only seconds prior, he says “we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons, other countries do, we can’t” as some of the most obvious bait ever.
Interesting.
Why, though? Would people around him think it’s a good idea? When they’re already kept busy trying to shrug off his worst eruptions?
To me it looks more like Trump inciting the crowd the way he does, and getting more and more elated by it, in the manner of Eichmann, and the crowd responding in kind. I don’t really see him planning ahead of time to say that. Not because he’s better than that but because he doesn’t want the grief.
If he didn’t want the grief, wouldn’t his response have been a rebuke? A sharp ‘No! That’s not the way to do things’ would have stood him in better stead than his smirking ‘Ooonly in the panhandle…’
He doesn’t want the grief if he thinks about it in cold blood, is what I’m guessing, but he works himself up and the crowds work him up. He’s an idiot with no impulse control so he does things that will bite him in the ass an hour later. I don’t see him planning to say it in advance. I don’t think he would plant anyone in the audience because I don’t see what it would get him.
See, Dave’s example @ 6 makes sense, because he had reasons to want Butina to ask him about sanctions. But raving about shooting people at the border doesn’t get him anything he wants apart from the short-term jollies of talking racist shit in public.