Trump is escalating his rhetoric. How far will he and his MAGA mob take it?
It may seem superfluous to say this, but it needs saying: He means it. Donald Trump meant it when he called his mob to Washington in December of 2020 by telling them, “Be there, will be wild!” and he means it right now when he tells the mobs at his rallies that the members of the January 6 Committee belong in jail, and if he is elected in November, he will have his Department of Justice “go after” President Biden and his family.
Donald Trump is dangerously escalating the rhetoric he is using to rile up his followers at his rallies. On Saturday in Dayton, Ohio, he saluted those convicted of violently attacking police officers and doing damage to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” And he executed a military-style salute as a loudspeaker played a version of the National Anthem sung into a telephone in a federal prison by felons convicted of crimes at the Capitol.
Let’s stop right there and discuss what it means for Donald Trump to salute people convicted of committing crimes on Jan. 6. A report on ABC News way back in September of 2021, just eight months after the assault on the Capitol, said that a comprehensive review of police body-cam footage taken on Jan. 6 found that about 1,000 individual assaults had been committed against police officers. That doesn’t mean that 1,000 people had assaulted police officers. Instead, it means that an indeterminate number of people had committed 1,000 assaults on police officers – individual strikes with weapons, hits with fists, sprays with chemicals, pushing officers off their feet, dragging them by their feet, even in one case, dragging an officer down steps in front of the Capitol so that his head bounced as it fell from step to step.
Hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump have been convicted of violent offenses at this point. Some of them are facing years in prison for the assaults they committed. Remember the guy who beat a police officer with a flagpole? His name is Peter Stager, and he struck the officer as one of his compatriots, Logan Barnhart, was dragging the officer down the Capitol steps. In January, Stager was sentenced to 52 months in federal prison. Last April, Barnhart was sentenced to 36 months.
Those are just two of the “unbelievable patriots” Donald Trump saluted on Saturday in Ohio.
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Calling on his ‘troops’. Hopefully our children (and on) will look back in history class where this be rightly labeled a period of suicidal anti-democratic insanity. An object lesson on why every child needs a comprehensive education including logic and ethics.
There probably is something more disgusting than the Bloated Yam, but, offhand, I cannot think of it.