The president of the United States won’t mention our children getting shot to death in their classrooms, but he will laugh and hee-haw at shooting migrant families at the border, as he did during a rally in Florida Wednesday night. “How do you stop these people?” Donald Trump asked about asylum-seekers and others at our southern border, seemingly complaining aloud that border agents can’t use weapons against them. “Other countries do, we can’t. I would never do that.”
But from the crowd, a supporter yells, “Shoot them!” The crowd bursts into cheers and laughter as one woman behind Trump visibly grimaces and shakes her head. She’s in the minority, because the supporters around her clap and laugh like it’s just the funniest darn thing they’ve ever heard. There’s a reason why they support Trump, after all.
Now, in any other similar circumstance, a decent person would have immediately rebuked this. That is so horrifically wrong. You’re saying this because you really think it, and I don’t want your support. But the president of the United States is not a decent man but an unwell one, and responds, “that’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff.” Trump then smiles and sways his body behind the presidential podium like he’s listening to a Beach Boys song and again says, “only in the Panhandle.”
He moved on, and so will the news cycle about this remark in two days. But Trump’s rhetoric is a danger to this nation. It’s designed to incite. It already has from the start, when two of his supporters beat and urinated on a Latino man during the early weeks of his presidential campaign. Trump didn’t disavow those violent, racist supporters but instead praised them as “very passionate.” His very passionate fans eventually pleaded guilty to various charges, including causing bodily injury while committing a civil rights violation.
The further danger is that border vigilantes, right now, have reportedly complained that they can’t shoot families at the border. One of the border vigilantes who was part of the group that held hundreds of migrants hostage at gunpoint at the border earlier this year reportedly asked, "Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them? We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber."
