The next president of the United States won’t always have the benefit of a script to protect against saying something stupid, regrettable or downright inciteful.
Everything that will be uttered by the nation’s next chief executive and commander in chief — whether at a news conference or in a meeting with another head of state — will be parsed for its meaning and implications. The president’s words are expected to reflect intelligence, thoughtfulness, reason and responsibility, thanks to command of the language (which includes speaking in complete sentences) and critical thinking skills.
And that’s why the more he talks, the more reasons Donald Trump gives us to find him unfit for the Oval Office. For all the viewers of the evening news who are left slack-jawed by his rambling and aggressive — if not explicitly threatening — remarks, just imagine the wide-eyed translators at the United Nations when telling world leaders in their own languages what the president is believed to have just said.
The bully Trump — and make no mistake, he loves playing that role — is not only belittling and crude toward women, minorities and the disabled, but he openly embraces violence, and not just at campaign stops. Before last month’s Republican National Convention, he suggested there would be street riots among his supporters if the party wrangled the nomination away from him. More recently. he told Fox News, “Nov. 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.” (According to a recent poll, 76 percent of Trump followers in North Carolina think that if Clinton wins, it will be because the election was rigged.)
And now comes his most recent remarks, which echoed the dark rhetoric used by Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who ran unsuccessfully in 2010 to unseat Sen. Harry Reid, who champions greater gun control. The Second Amendment, she said at the time, is “to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”
Second Amendment remedies? It doesn’t take much to decipher that code.
And that brings us to a rally last week in North Carolina, where Trump hewed to that Clinton-victory theme to stir his supporters — and again invoked guns. “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment,” he told a booing crowd, and added, “By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”
His remark harked back to Angle’s unambiguous code, those “Second Amendment remedies.”
And lest people think Trump wouldn’t dare be so dark, so intimidating, so evilly suggestive, consider the remarks made by Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state politician and retired Marine sergeant, who advises Trump on issues involving veterans.
On a radio show broadcast from the Republican National Convention, Baldasaro said he holds Clinton responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and that she should be “put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
This adviser also has picked up on the rigged-election conspiracy, openly advocating for violence if Trump loses: “If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts. I think (Trump has) gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
It’s actually a blessing that Trump doesn’t speak often from a script; his unscripted remarks betray a dark, conspiracy-minded mad man who talks fondly of violence and imagines himself sitting in the Oval Office. Sane people — Republicans and Democrats alike — need to put an end to this most bizarre episode of American politics on Nov. 8.