Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:12 pm
Last week, Donald Trump suggested that members of the Secret Service who are tasked with protecting Hillary Clinton should disarm and then “let’s see what happens to her.”
To anyone not blindly supporting Trump, this is clearly an encouragement of violence against the Democratic nominee. It’s not even the first time Trump has done so.
In August, the Republican nominee suggested that “second amendment people” could take up arms against Clinton if she is elected president and decides to fulfill her responsibility of appointing Supreme Court justices.
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Though the media has pretty much brushed Trump’s latest incitement of violence under the rug, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren isn’t letting the Republican nominee off the hook so fast.
On Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s ‘All In with Chris Hayes’, Warren blasted Trump’s dangerous rhetoric, saying it disqualifies him from being president.
.@SenWarren on Trump’s comments about disarming the secret service “What kind of a human being are we talking about?” #inners
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 20, 2016
Warren said:
This is Donald Trump saying, ‘Hey, there’s another way to deal here.’ Again, this goes back to this question of what kind of a human being are we talking about? So, he’s losing to Hillary Clinton and his answer is to say somebody should get out there and do violence? Look, I get it, campaigns are a time of heated rhetoric, people can get excited, they can overreach, they can say things they don’t mean. But Donald Trump has now done this twice and he’s been called out for it both times. And when you do it twice, it seems to me pretty clear what your motivation is here. So I think it’s just one more example of why Donald Trump not only shouldn’t be president but is truly disqualified to be president.Â
In any other election year with any other presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s repeated calls for violence against his opponent would be on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. Instead, he calls for Clinton opponents to violently rebel against her – not once but twice – and it doesn’t get more than a day or two of coverage.
Apparently, Trump implying that Clinton should be assassinated isn’t as bad as Clinton’s largely accurate assertion that a good portion of those supporting Trump’s candidacy are “deplorable” bigots, because it was the latter comment that got the most negative media attention.
Hopefully, more members of the press and more Democratic leaders continue to hold Trump’s feet to the fire, like Warren did, about this inflammatory rhetoric that doesn’t just make America’s political environment more toxic but also encourages those on the fringes to actually think violence is an appropriate means of expressing political beliefs.
I understand that Donald Trump’s bar is about as low as possible, but that doesn’t mean he should so easily get away with things that no other political figure ever would.
Kudos to Elizabeth Warren for not letting Trump get away with it.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
