Donald Trump’s menacing presence on the Debate stage as he lurked behind Hillary with an ominous look on his face was disturbing in and of itself. Calling Hillary “evil” and brushing off his boasts of sexually assaulting women as “locker room talk,” were unacceptable and demonstrated how Trump is unfit to be President.
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But it was Trump’s threat to our democracy that was most demonstrative of the fact that Trump is unfit to be President.
Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy
There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.
The exchange happened during a discussion of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Trump began by decrying Clinton’s conduct — which, according to the FBI, was quite bad but not illegal. He then proposed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate her, and warned Clinton that, if he were president now, “you’d be in jail”:
TRANSCRIPT
TRUMP: I'll tell you what. I didn't think I'd say this, and I'm going to say it, and hate to say it: If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there's never been so many lies, so much deception … A very expensive process, so we're going to get a special prosecutor because people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done. And it's a disgrace, and honestly, you ought to be ashamed.
CLINTON: Let me just talk about emails, because everything he just said is absolutely false. But I'm not surprised … It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.
DT: Because you'd be in jail.
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For a Presidential candidate to threaten their opponent with jail if they were to win is unprecedented.
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Trump’s threat reveals both his profound ignorance and his lust for dictatorships.
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In his last line — “you’d be in jail” — he is outright saying that he would imprison Hillary Clinton in office (if he could). This comes despite the fact that there is no evidence Clinton committed a crime in her handling of the email servers, despite lengthy investigations that found evidence of carelessness and dishonesty. That would be a politically motivated prosecution — retribution for daring to run against Trump and attack him during the campaign.
This is everything we feared about Donald Trump. His long history of trying to silence critics with lawsuits, his inability to let personal slights go, his pettiness: The nightmare scenario is that these would incline him to use the power of the presidency to forcibly silence his critics and opponents. That’s what is done by tin-pot dictators spanning the globe from North Korea to Zimbabwe. That’s what happens in countries where peaceful transitions of power are the exception, not the rule.
Donald Trump just threatened to bring that to America.
Monday, Oct 10, 2016 · 3:48:40 AM +00:00 · igualdad
The majority of the American public is starting to take more notice of how abnormal Trump is. He is an extremist Authoritarian who is profoundly ignorant.
His chants of “Lock her up” may still draw some cheers at his rallies but said in front of a more diverse audience, they do not play well and may be what cost him the debate tonight. The second debate he lost. And by a wide margin.
Monday, Oct 10, 2016 · 5:16:27 AM +00:00 · igualdad
The Nation has just published an article on how Trump’s outrageous remarks to jail Hillary if he were to win, sum up his Totalitarian Vision.
The entire article is well worth the read but the below excerpts speak to how Trump’s threat is un-American and represents his Authoritarian stance.
That was slimy. That was depressing. But it was something more: antithetical to every historic and contemporary understanding of the American experiment.
There are countries where winners of political fights have moved to jail their rivals. But those countries are not constitutional democracies. Indeed, as Maraniss explained after Trump’s ominous announcement: “This is THE definition of fascism — Trump saying Hillary would be in jail if he were president.”
The basic premise of the American experiment is this: presidential candidates and parties compete with one another, passionately, intensely, in campaigns that conclude with elections in which the voters settle the score. An election victory does not confer upon the new president the authority to jail his opponent. As lawless as Richard Nixon may have been, as long as his“enemies list” may have grown, the 37th president let Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern be; indeed, both of the Democrats served in the Senate majority that frequently challenged Nixon.
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But this has not been a country where candidates have spoken of jailing their vanquished opponents. If it should ever become that country, it will not be a “successful experiment.” It will be a diminished land governed by a man who “cannot be trusted with the government of himself” and cannot “be trusted with the government of others.”
Monday, Oct 10, 2016 · 2:46:54 PM +00:00 · igualdad
Now trending on twitter: Trump Shows his Inner Dictator
A Presidential candidate saying that his opponent should be behind bars—and will be, if he has anything to do with it—may be new and shocking in a Presidential debate. But it is not new in this campaign. It is, indeed, one of the most regular features of Trumpism; “Lock her up” chants are heard at almost all his rallies. That doesn’t make it less disturbing. The jail threat is jarring, in part, because it reflects what Trump understands the power of the President to be: he gets to lock her up. (Trump has a whole set of conspiracy theories based on the notion that President Obama is blackmailing Clinton with the threat that he will lock her up.) “Hillary for Prison” buttons are for sale on the Trump campaign Web site. And such threats are not new, sadly, in the world beyond America. The use of criminal law as a discretionary political tool is why, historically, some people have wanted to leave other countries to come here. Trump put an ugly smudge on that beacon.