Supporting Trump Means Supporting a Culture of Violence

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/04/supporting-trump-means-supporting-a-culture-of-violence/677941/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/68xNv

‘Is This Who You Are?’

On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.

The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.

Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly.
Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.

But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[DLCWIdem]

2. Yes

I started a thread myself a couple of days saying almost the same thing when I heard about the picture. I also mentioned the effigy those Republicans were beating up in the Kansas City GOP fundraiser. I believe I said that the party who likes to pretend they are the party of law and order are just the party of violence.

[Wonder Why]

3. "A Culture of Violence" by people who are heavily armed and fighting to be allowed more automatic weapons.

[B.See]

4. Yes, this is who they are

[raccoon]

5. Last time I saw it, the picture was a hostage with a gunshot wound in the head.

[TSExile]

6. Yes!!

If you are pro-TSF, you are pro-rape, pro-hate, pro-violence - all of it.