Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald John Trump has said a lot of controversial things in his time. Part of his so-called appeal to his dedicated base of voters is that he “tells it like it is” in a brash no-holds-barred style that defies “political correctness.” In his best selling book The Art of the Deal he argues that “Sometimes it pays to be a little wild” as part of his negotiating style. So some of the things he says are merely a tactic—merely a strategy to either focus or divert attention—and need to be taken with heaping grains of salt.
On the other hand they might also indicate a long pattern and tendency of intimidation and violence. A tendency that could lead to consequences In Connecticut and California, where Gun Violence and Firearms Restraining Order Laws are on the books that forbid anyone to carry or possess a firearm who behaves as Trump has in public for the protection of the public, his family and even himself.
Trump himself says he owns a licensed firearm:
KATY TUR, NBC NEWS: You’re for the Second Amendment. Do you have a gun?
DONALD TRUMP: I have a license to have a gun. Yes I do.
NBC: Do you use it? Gun ranges?
DONALD TRUMP: It is none of your business, it is really none of your business. I have a license to have a gun.
NBC: Gun control.
DONALD TRUMP: What are you talking about? Yes I have a gun, and yes I have a permit for it.
We would all hope that he would only use it in lawful ways. But then that remains to be seen as some of his most controversial statements lately advocate violence against protesters at his rallies. In fact, several times he didn’t just support the crowd being violent, he also made threats himself.
During a St. Louis rally he said...
“You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" he explained.
After a man was sucker-punched while being escorted out by police at a Fayettvile, North Carolina, rally Trump responded.
"The audience hit back and that's what we need a little bit more of."
“They used to treat them very, very rough, and when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily,” he said, before lamenting "we've become weak."
"Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court, don't worry about it."
But it’s sometimes gone much further than just egging on the crowd. As one protester was being removed:
"I'd like to punch him in the face," Trump said, remarking that a man disrupting his rally was escorted out with a smile on his face. "He's smiling, having a good time."
And in Kansas City...
At a campaign rally in Kansas City on Saturday, the day after the unrest in Chicago, Trump addressed an earlier event in Dayton, Ohio, when a protester tried to storm the stage.
The candidate said he would have fought the person had he reached the lectern and mimed punching him a few times.
"I'll beat the crap out of you," he then mouthed.
But what I found most disturbing was his description of what putting a bullet between the eyes of the Orlando shooter at the Pulse would have been like:
If we had people where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac," Trump began to openly consider. He then added: "That would've been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks."
I may be strange, but even though I might agree that self-defense requiring deadly force was indeed needed in this case, I would never describe the type of thing that was shown in one of the early scenes of Pulp Fiction—splattered bone and brain matter all over the auto’s back seat—to be “a beautiful, beautiful sight.” Maybe that’s just me.
However, is this just a recent trend for him, a method of feeding red rhetorical meat to his masses? Perhaps not. As has been well-reported, Trump has a habit of going for the jugular even when it’s far from warranted. Like when he called for the return of the death penalty in New York in response to the 1989 Central Park rape case.
Nearly three decades before the rambunctious billionaire began his run for president—before he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, for the expulsion of all undocumented migrants, before he branded Mexicans as “rapists” and was accused of mocking the disabled—Trump called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following a horrific rape case in which five teenagers were wrongly convicted.
The miscarriage of justice is widely remembered as a definitive moment in New York’s fractured race relations. But Trump’s intervention—he signed full-page newspaper advertisements implicitly calling for the boys to die—has been seemingly forgotten as the businessman’s chances of winning the Republican nomination have rapidly increased. Now those involved in the case of the so-called Central Park Five and its aftermath say Trump’s rhetoric served as an unlikely precursor to a unique brand of divisive populism that has powered his rise to political prominence in 2016.
“He was the fire starter,” Salaam said of Trump, in his first extended interview since Trump announced his run for the White House. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.”
The officers in the case coerced a set of teenagers into implicating each other when none of them were even present for the crime. There was no DNA match to any of them with the semen that was recovered. No witnesses. No physical evidence. Yet Trump took out a full-page ad calling for the boys — all underage minors — to be executed even though the victim survived and eventually recovered physically, if probably not emotionally. Normally, the modern death penalty is applied only in murder cases with special circumstances. It is against international standards to execute children—the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juveniles in 2005. But this didn’t matter to Trump. It also didn’t matter much to him that they didn’t do the crime.
Following a 14-year court battle, the Central Park Five settled a civil case with the city for $41m in 2014. But far from offering an apology for his conduct in 1989, Trump was furious.
In an opinion piece for the New York Daily News, he described the case as the “heist of the century”.
“Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels,” Trump wrote, alluding to how police and prosecutors initially involved in the case have long maintained the five boys were involved in the rape, even after the convictions were thrown out.
The man who confessed to the crime, whose DNA matched what was found on the victim, says that he did it alone, and there is no physical evidence anyone else was involved yet Trump continues to believe the police and prosecutors’ false claims when their only evidence was their ability to scare a bunch of teenage kids into saying what they wanted them to say after 24 straight hours of interrogation — which allegedly included multiple beatings? Many people have been exonerated after giving false confessions under duress and coercion.
All that’s bad enough, but this is just a minor example of Trump’s racist tendencies, which were alleged to be even worse behind closed doors, according to John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino:
“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
Trump’s companies were sued for discrimination against black renters in 1973. After promising not to do it anymore, they were sued three years later for again discriminating against black applicants.
And it’s not just his racism, as one of his own biographers put it, it’s his own tenuous relationship with reality itself:
Trump was asked if he worried that his publicly confrontational style would affect his political prospects. He retorted instantly with a reference to the Central Park Five.
“I think it will help me,” he said. “I think people are tired of politically correct. I just attacked the Central Park Five settlement. Who’s going to do that?”
The biographer was shocked by what he heard. “His insensitivity and inability to adjust to reality is sometimes shocking,” D’Antonio said of Trump. “But I don’t think that he is necessarily interested in reality as others experience it or as it’s determined by the courts.”
Part of why Trump may have difficulty recognizing reality as others—and the courts—see it may be the possibility that he keeps himself in a constant state of sleep deprivation:
Egan pointed to Trump’s comments last November in which he boasted about his disinterest in sleep. As reported by Nara Schoenberg in the Chicago Tribune, Trump told a crowd in Springfield, Illinois that “I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.” A few days later Trump told Henry Blodget in an interview for Business Insider that he can get by on as little as one hour of sleep.
Which can have severe consequences:
“His judgment is off, and almost always ill informed. He has trouble processing basic information. He imagines things. He shows a lack of concentration... in addition, Trump is given to inchoate bursts of anger and profanity. He creates feuds. In his speeches, he picks up on the angry voice in the mob and then amplifies it.”
But going beyond mere words, bluster, or even ads in The New York Times, has Trump himself shown any tendencies for carrying out violence? According to sworn testimony and various affidavits, yes. Starting with his first wife’s allegations of rape during their divorce:
Ivana Trump’s assertion of “rape” came in a deposition—part of the early ’90s divorce case between the Trumps, and revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.
The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene. After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.
“Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.
What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.
“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”
In the years since, Ivana has softened this allegation: “I felt emotionally raped, but not in the legal sense” and more recently has released a statement claiming her prior testimony was “totally without merit” so those looking at this from the outside have to gauge whether Ivana Trump lied under oath in order to gain leverage in her divorce over the prenuptial agreement she had signed or she’s lying now with her denials in accordance with the post-divorce gag order she signed that gives Donald approval of any comments she makes publicly about their marriage?
The 1990 divorce case between the two Trumps was granted on the grounds of Donald’s “cruel and inhuman treatment” of Ivana. The settlement, under which the Trumps agreed on the division of assets, was finalized in 1991. Her divorce involved a gag order that keeps her from talking about her marriage to Donald Trump without his permission.
So when she now says it was “totally without merit,” is that Ivana speaking or is that Donald Trump’s gag order talking? If this were merely a case of extreme divorce negotiations, we wouldn’t see any kind of pattern to these types of allegations. They wouldn’t have happened more than once. But then, they have:
The lawsuit was filed by Jill Harth who then went by Jill Harth Houraney on April 25, 1997. Harth, who was in her early 30’s at the time, alleged that Trump engaged in hostile and offensive sexual behavior towards her from 1992 to 1997 including “groping” her under her dress on several occasions, “forcibly” moving her to his daughter’s bedroom in an attempt to have sex with her, and repeatedly, aggressively and inappropriately propositioning her for sex. She called it “sexually abusive” and LawNewz.com spoke to her in an exclusive interview.
In the suit Harth alleges the following occurred at Mar-A-Lago in 1993:
After Trump business associates left, the defendant (Trump) over the plaintiff’s objections forcibly prevented plaintiff from leaving and forcibly removed plaintiff to a bedroom, whereupon defendant (Trump) subjected plaintiff to defendant’s unwanted sexual advances, which included touching of plaintiff’s private parts in an act constituting attempted “rape.”
At this time the suit has been withdrawn, but not without some questionable circumstances:
At the time, Trump vigorously denied the charges saying the suit “was a desperate attempt to get me to settle a case they can’t win.” But then, not even a month after filing the case, Harth withdrew it. The court record indicates it was “voluntarily dismissed” but “without prejudice,” meaning she could have re-filed the case. The timing is interesting because at around the same time the case was withdrawn, Trump reportedly agreed to settle with her husband’s company, The American Dream Enterprise, according to an obscure 1997 gossip article in the New York Daily News which appears to be the only mainstream media coverage of either suit.
So perhaps both his ex-wife and Jill Harth made these allegations merely as means of negotiating with Donald on other matters, as he alleges, and there really isn’t any fire under all that smoke. Except that there’s still yet another case:
A bizarre lawsuit involving a California woman’s charge that Donald Trump raped her when she was an underage teen have resurfaced, this time in a Manhattan Federal Court.
Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential candidate, has already denounced the allegations once as “categorically false” and “disgusting.”
The suit alleges that at a series of parties hosted by convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein the plaintiff was raped by both Trump and Epstein when she was just 13-years-old. She has since proclaimed that she didn’t file charges at the time in 1994, allowing the five-year statute of limitations to expire, because...
“Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed,” the plaintiff said in an affidavit.
Unlike Ivana and Ms. Harth, this plaintiff has received no compensation nor negotiated any type of settlement at this time. In her initial suit filed in California. which she did herself, her attorney argues that it contained some technical flaws before it was refiled it in New York.
It might be that these three women are exaggerating or lying, as Donald would likely claim. There’s no other history of this kind of behavior from him (except for his long history of demeaning and insulting women).
But then where’s does that put Donald’s claim that “Hillary Clinton was an enabler” for not immediately believing all the claims made by various women against her husband the ex-president? According to him we should always believe and protect women, except apparently when they’re talking about himself.
And this brings us back to the original question: Should a firearms restraining order against Donald Trump be filed, particularly by the latest plaintiff, when he has a history of statements advocating violence and stating his own violent intentions: “I wanna punch him in the mouth,” “I’ll beat the crap out of you,” “[blowing his head off] would be a beautiful, beautiful thing.” Plus his support for using the death penalty against children and opposition to compensation for wrongful imprisonment. And, according to close confidants, his difficulty “with reality.” His suffering the effects of sleep deprivation, which has a tendency to provoke “violent outbursts of anger.”
Is it really a good idea for this particularly guy to be armed? Never mind who and what Trump is, his wealth or his position in life or the fact he currently has Secret Service protection as well as his own private security. If all I have written here was true about anyone—should that person be armed?
To help answer the question, I contacted the offices of Rep. Nancy Skinner of the California State Assembly, who is now running for state senate. They sent me a list of some of the documentation available online concerning firearms restraining orders.
Press release from Brady Campaign when AB 1014/GVRO was signed: www.bradycampaign.org/...
Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Memo on GVRO: smartgunlaws.org/...
Docs From CA Judicial Council: www.courts.ca.gov/...
With the links above, a concerned person who is an acquaintance of Mr Trump, a family member, member of law enforcement, perhaps someone who is in a current court action against him involving either violence or intimidation, or someone who has yet to come forward and who might be greatly concerned with some of what I have detailed above or their own personal experiences with Trump could download the appropriate documents and then file them with the California courts for a nominal fee and see how things go.
I can’t tell them what they should or shouldn’t do. All I can do is ask the question.
Would you want this man walking around anywhere near you or your loved ones with a loaded gun in his possession? Or for that matter, with the nation’s nuclear launch codes?