Donald Trump, in His Own Words and Deeds

The 2024 election in the United States has reached comical levels of asymmetry, in which the minute details of Kamala Harris’s policy proposals are scrutinized while “mass deportation to ease demand” is treated as on par. We have all grown numb to the firehose of unhinged statements by Donald Trump that even his critics have trouble making a focused case to voters that they should not simply shrug it off as “that’s just how Trump is.” The Washington Post editorial board tried this, which is to their credit, but in my view they fell well short of their goal.

The problem is that Trump has said so much it can be difficult to distill it without making it seem simply like a laundry list of complaints. It is a truly tall order to seize the attention of voters who have been desensitized to Trump’s rhetoric, and who may not perceive their own lives as having been much impacted by Trump’s first term. Those who do care about such things have already made their choice. The rest either like what Trump is selling, or have rationalized it to some extent because they cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.

In what follows I will try to take the smallest number of quotes I can to convey how shockingly extreme Trump’s statements are. He regularly says things that would have ended the political career of any figure in my lifetime before 2015.

I recognize that the voters we need to reach are unlikely to give the time of day to an article on a publication named Liberal Currents. So I hope that those of you with friends, family, and acquaintances you feel can be reached will find the following to be of some value to you.

Highlights of the very recent material

Let us look at a few things he has said just since September.

On September 22nd, Trump suggested that in the good old days, they would have executed General Mark Milley. Here are his words (bold added by me):

Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week. This will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate! This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act.

On September 29, Trump argued that all we would need is a single hour of complete unrestrained violence against alleged criminals, and crime would be solved. 

Would you say, Mike, that if you were in charge, you would say, “Oh, please don’t touch them. Don’t touch them. Let them rob your store.” All these stores go out of business, right? They don’t pay rent. The city doesn’t have [inaudible 00:40:49]. It’s a chain of events. It’s so bad. One rough hour and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. It’ll end immediately.

Needless to say, strongmen promising extrajudicial violence when in office do not have a wonderful track record.

Just days ago, on October 11, Trump stated that he would use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize deportations. As the Brennan Center subsequently explained, “The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship.” 

The last time it was invoked was to enable the Japanese internment, in which American citizens were taken from their homes and put in camps for committing no crime beyond having the wrong nation of origin. 

The reference to it here puts a lie on the notion that Trump would only be going after illegal immigrants, as nation of origin is the only criterion for this statute; targeted individuals need not have ever broken a single law. 

Even if you believe that the courts would rule against using it today, they are far, far too slow to stop a significant amount of detention and deportation from occurring under its auspices. And do not forget that the first line of courts faced in immigration cases are not part of the judicial branch at all, but actually part of the Department of Justice.

This is a long one, but I encourage you to read until the end. Here are Trump’s own words:

We are now known, all throughout the world, as OCCUPIED AMERICA...But to everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation, I make you this vow: November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America. I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered—and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.

In honor of Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and all of the others that are dead and mortally wounded at the hands of migrants who should never have been allowed into our Country, I am announcing today that upon taking office, we will have an OPERATION AURORA at the Federal Level. To expedite removals of this savage gang, I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil.

No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States!

Note also that Aurora’s Republican mayor has argued that Trump is simply making things up about his town. A pattern in this election cycle, which has included Springfield, Ohio’s local and state Republicans doing the same.

On October 11, “It’s the enemy from within. All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”

On October 13, feeling the need to revisit the matter at greater length:

I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries. Because if you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily. I get along great with all—I handled them. But the thing that's tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.

While Kamala Harris is promising to include a Republican in her cabinet and to create a bipartisan council of advisors, Trump is referring to ordinary Democrats as “the enemy within” who are more dangerous than China or Russia (with whom he gets along great).

A couple of other one-liners of note from October so far:

• “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (October 7)
• “I said, ‘Sean, I only want to be a dictator for one day, and I’m going to close the borders and drill, baby drill. But after that, I never want to be a dictator.’” (October 6)

This is just in the past month. One does not have to go back very far to find more. In June, for example, he noted that “sometimes revenge can be justified” in the context of prosecuting people purely for having wronged him personally. In March, he stated that “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” It truly is difficult to decide what to highlight.

A note on disrespecting the military

The above really ought to be enough. Unfortunately, I doubt that it is, even if you do convince the moderates and swing voters in your life to truly confront the substance of what Trump said in each case.

So in parting, I want to focus on the strangest aspect of Trump being the Republicans’ man: his consistent, public, unapologetic disrespect for the military.

This has always been perplexing. Even the slightest disrespect used to be seen as politically dangerous. And Trump’s disrespect has not been slight.

Rolling Stone has a good summary of Trump’s track record on this. The highlights:

• His recent attempt to use Arlington National Cemetery for publicity purposes, which resulted in some of his staff assaulting some of the Cemetery staff to get his way. A Trump campaign spokesman later tried to smear the Cemetery staff by stating they were “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
• Comparing the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Congressional Medal of Honor, “It’s actually much better, because everyone who gets the congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.” (August 16)
• And of course, way back in 2015, he said of John McCain, ““He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” He then proceeded to get in a public spat with a Gold Star family in 2016.

I would have thought that the overlap of people who did not care if you disrespected minorities and people who did not care if you disrespected the military was quite small, but Trump’s enduring presence in national politics seems to have disproven my assumption.

Still, it cannot hurt to make as many people as possible actually confront these statements and actions of Trump’s. It’s very easy, when dealing with the immediate challenges in your own life, to tune this stuff out, to let it all bleed together.

That is precisely why it is crucial to pick a few key things Trump has said and do our best to confront people with them now, at the moment of truth, when they will either be voting very soon, or, in many states, are already able to.

Featured image is Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore