Is there anything Donald Trump could not solve in a week, according to Donald Trump? Monday, Bill O’Reilly asked Trump to discuss his promise to end “the chaos and violence on our streets and the assault on law enforcement.” Easy peasy, said Trump. “I know police in Chicago. If they were given the authority to do it, they would get it done.”
The authority? What ever could he mean by that?
“You have unbelievable—how? By being very much tougher than they are right now. They are right now not tough. I mean, I could tell you this very long and quite boring story but when I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very top police. I said, ‘How do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge,’ to a specific person, ‘Do you think you could stop it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, I would be able to stop it in one week.’ And I believed him 100 percent.”
How? How could this very top police man in one week put a stop to … all murder? Street violence?
Obviously: “He wants to use tough—he wants to use tough police tactics.” And we can believe he could work wonders, because “I could see by the way he was dealing with his people, he was a rough, tough guy.”
It’s not too hard to read between those lines: Donald Trump thinks that allowing the police to be as violent as they want would solve the problem of non-state violence, within a week or so. It’s a fantasy of lawless machismo and it’s totally Trump. Problems aren’t hard, they just haven’t had Donald Trump there to cut through the bullshit and crack some skulls—literally, in this case.
Naturally, gun reform is no part of Trump’s plan to end gun violence.