The claim that “the way [Trump] handled himself in the last 60 days" marks some sort of dramatic change in his actions and rhetoric is not credible. He has employed violent language & explicitly called his supporters to violence since his 2016 campaign./1 washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
In 2019 he said, "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad/" /2 thehill.com/homenews/admin…
Here's an article from _March 2016_, well before he got the nomination, about "all the times Trump has called for violence at his rallies."/3 mashable.com/2016/03/12/tru…
In August 2016, he hinted at the possibility that his "Second Amendment" supporters might shoot Hillary Clinton: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”/4 nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/…
As the protests responding to the murder of George Floyd began, Trump said "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," echoing a phrase used by segregationists./5 vox.com/identities/202…
His tweet, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!; LIBERATE MINNESOTA!; LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!," preceded the violent breaching of the MI state capitol by white supremacists./6
Speaking to law enforcement officials in 2017, Trump encouraged police officers to be "rough" with the people they arrest./7 washingtonpost.com/news/politics/…
An undercurrent of violence, which not infrequently became explicit, has been a consistent through-line of the Trump campaign and presidency. Nobody should be able to claim to be shocked by his incitement to violence last week./10
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Since Reconstruction, variants of the claim that "our freedom is being stolen" has been used to justify white backlash.
In a fairly anodyne version in 2016, Phil Gramm said, "I’m afraid that if we don’t win this election and overturn Obama’s programs now, my five grandchildren will never know the America I knew....our freedom is being lost." dallasnews.com/opinion/commen…
Gramm was, of course, evoking Ronald Reagan's 1961 claim that, if Medicare passed, we would spend “sunset years” telling “our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."/3
Query: Has anyone compiled a comprehensive list of the prominent people, politicians, media outlets, and organizations (ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the NAACP) calling for Trump's immediate removal from office?
Why does nearly every article about the GA Senate race start with the Republicans groundless charged about the “extreme socialism” of the Democratic candidates? And why is the not only real but self-proclaimed extremism of the GOP never mentioned? /1 nytimes.com/2020/12/30/us/…
I provided a brief history of the socialism charge from the New Deal to the present in this @DissentMag article and have more to say about it in my book, FREE ENTERPRISE: AMERICAN HISTORY./2
Here is a passage from the introduction about the “slippery slope from reform to totalitarianism” that was central to the anti-New Deal playbook and to all subsequent reform efforts. /3
In FREE ENTERPRISE, I discuss a group that condemned advocates of a robust welfare state as daydreamers who promised "something for nothing." Yet these people, who, like Paul, depicted themselves as hard-headed realists, posited the miraculous, faith-based nature of free markets.
Paul’s critique, founded upon a kind of inverted producerism, has a long genealogy.
In 1950, Robert Bremen’s noted the “semantic somersault” of the phrase “something for nothing”: it had become “a missile by the spokesman of big business and political conservativism to hurl at what they called the ‘gimme’ attitude of the common folk toward government.”
I disagree that Trump ran as an "economic populist" in 2016. He called for tax cuts for the rich, opposed increasing the minimum wage (@PeterBeinart says otherwise), & called for eliminating health care for millions. The populism was purely performative. nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/…
Trump said a bunch of bs stuff about how his taxes would go up, but his proposed plan made clear that it benefitted the wealthy, that it was a typical Republican plan./3 taxfoundation.org/details-analys…
The irony of the 60 Minutes interviews is that Biden faced much tougher questions. They asked him, and not the guy who recently bragged about acing a dementia test, whether he was senile. They asked him, and not the guy who just got out of the hospital, about his health. /1
When Trump couldn’t name a policy priority, rather than zeroing in on his inability to do so, Stahl changed the subject to “Who is our biggest foreign adversary?” Other than COVID, she didn’t ask him to defend or explain any of his policies or about his personal tax avoidance./3
To be fair, Stahl had more questions that she didn’t get to ask because he walked out early, but there was nothing about his threats to free and fair elections, about about kids in cages, or about tax cuts for the rich, about corruption in his administration, or climate change./3