For months Donald Trump has been torturing us with his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. And for months he’s spouted unqualified support for real torture. That doesn’t make him unique. Ted Cruz claims to be against torture, but he supports waterboarding and other techniques associated with that rancid euphemism: “enhanced interrogation.” So does Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, although they each qualify their support by suggesting these methods only be used occasionally.
Obviously, each of them views as “quaint” relics the provisions of the Geneva Conventions barring torture—the same as another Republican did not so long ago when he dressed up torture in legal language for the Bush administration.
But it’s Trump who has been unequivocal in the matter, even enlisting his son Eric to let everyone know that waterboarding is “no different than what happens on college campuses and frat houses every day.” The Donald himself has said that torture is a good thing even when it doesn’t elicit any action information: “If it doesn’t work,” he says, “they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.” And he’s pledged to "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
But Trump took the matter just a bit further Tuesday with a short op-ed in USA Today:
Though the effectiveness of many of these methods may be in dispute, nothing should be taken off the table when American lives are at stake. The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind. […]
I will do whatever it takes to protect and defend this nation and its people.
That remark ought to permanently retire the use of ”politically correct” from public discourse.
It ought also to elicit a question or two from the moderators at next week’s Republican debate. “Mr. Trump, will you include in ‘whatever it takes’ sexual torture and rape the way General Pinochet’s operatives did in Chile? Would you attach battery cables to their genitals? Suspend them upside down in chains for days? Starve them? Feed them excrement? Brand them? Threaten to kill their families? Conduct experiments on them?”
Sadly, pathetically, frighteningly, if such questions actually were asked, we could expect a big, profoundly sick chunk of the audience to cheer and wildly applaud every “yes” response from The Donald.