Trump laughed at a suggestion by one of his supporters that the way to stop immigrants at the border was to shoot them.
Trump laughs and jokes as his supporters call for immigrants to be shot
Trump said, “This is an invasion. When you see these caravans starting out with 20,000 people, that’s an invasion. I was badly criticized for using the word invasion. It’s an invasion. Folks, it’s crazy. And then they say — and the wall would help. Not help, the wall would stop it, okay, the wall would stop it. When you have 15,000 people marching up and you have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three bored border security people that are brave and great. We can’t let them use weapons. We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people? You can’t.”
One of his supporters shouted out, “shoot them.”
Trump laughed and joked, “There’s no — that’s only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement. Only in the panhandle. So it’s a tough situation.”
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Trump did nothing to discourage violence against immigrants
Trump’s supporters and enablers will say that the president himself didn’t call for the shooting of immigrants at the border, but Trump fed his supporters an endless supply of hateful rhetoric about non-white people at the rally. He scares his supporters with fears that migrants are coming for them, and when one of the suggests shooting immigrants, he laughs and does nothing to discourage the suggestion.
It is a pattern that existed since Trump started running for president. Trump doesn’t overtly tell his supporters to be violent, but he encourages that conclusion by whipping them into such a state of fear that they think that they have no other choice.
Trump is trying to hold on to power through fear, and the path to Democratic victory in 2020 is not to allow Donald Trump to scare America into the status quo.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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