ROUGH THEM UP OR KILL THEM; MAKES NO DIFFERENCE

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay. It’s incredible? ~ Donald Trump, GOP presidential candidate at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa

You could say “the Donald” was simply bragging about the loyalty of his political supporters or you could say that Trump was joking about the scratch-your-head success his presidential campaign is enjoying, but anybody with a nose for sniffing out a tyrant will tell you that Trump stinks to high heaven. Only a would-be dictator would boast that he could get away with anything, including murder. If Trump wins the White House, anyone with a political opinion that differs from his ought to think twice about his or her mortality. Think I’m kidding? Think again.

Last month, Trump visited with right-wing commentator Bill O’Reilly in Mesa, Arizona. O’Reilly asked Trump if he was serious about a pledge Trump made earlier at a campaign rally to hunt down and kill the families of terrorists. I suppose O’Reilly figured that Trump would back-off the pledge to kill innocent women and children, but Trump was unmoved and unapologetic. “If you want to get terrorists,” Trump thundered, “you have to take out their families, too.”

At one particular Trump event last month, a protestor from the Black Lives Matter movement showed up to demonstrate against Trump’s trivialization of the racial concerns of black Americans. A group of Trump supporters forcibly removed the protestor from the rally. After the ejection, Trump told the crowd, “Maybe he should have been roughed up!” That’s classic Trump – always looking for somebody to beat-up!

American politics is a rough-and-tumble affair. It’s always been that way, and people come to expect that in the heat of political battle, words that go over the top are sometimes uttered. Decent candidates apologize for their unsavory remarks. The callous ones, like Donald Trump, don’t. In fact, Trump often repeats the same abhorrent declaration over and over again.

Donald Trump has made a career out of bullying and battering people in the business world, so it’s no surprise that he would carry that same attitude over to the political arena. Is that what Americans want – a bully-in-chief?

In a democracy, political candidates cross the line of what is morally acceptable when they start advocating violence against fellow citizens with opposing political opinions. Study any dictator, and you will discover their path to power was littered with similar exhortations and rhetoric. That’s why Donald Trump is such a threat to our democracy and could very well set us on the path to ruin. I hope it doesn’t come to that in America, but if it does, nobody can say we weren’t warned!