One of the most unnerving moments of the presidential campaign came when Donald Trump’s supporters took up the chant “Lock her up! Lock her up!” The thought of one candidate’s supporters calling for their opponent to be jailed sounded like something you’d hear from a Third World country, not the United States. Did Donald Trump try and stop the calls for Hillary Clinton to be jailed? Far from it–he actually threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her. Well, it turns out that vow was yet another swindle in a lengthy list of them.
On Friday, Trump took his self-aggrandizing “Thank You Tour” to the DeltaPlex Arena in Walker, Michigan; near Grand Rapids. This is the heartland of the Michigan GOP, and is not far from the hometown of Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. So you would think that when someone yelled, “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Trump would essentially applaud him. Well, not exactly. Watch here.
When a Trump supporter tried to start the chant, Trump surprisingly shut the chant down.
“No, it’s okay. Forget it. That plays great before the election. Now, we don’t care, right?”
Well, that certainly makes those of us in the reality-based world feel better, Donald. You put a scare into us, made us fear that we would see a politically-motivated prosecution of a presidential candidate by our victorious opponent–and now you tell us it was just a gimmick?
This shouldn’t give us reason to applaud. It should send a chill down our spines. A presidential candidate who thinks it’s even remotely okay to joke about sending his opponent to jail is a full-on sociopath. Period, full stop. If Trump needs to be told why you don’t joke about this, then it’s yet more reason why he’s not fit to be president.
Listen to the whole thing here–if you can stand it–via WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids. What’s really telling is how the audience reacted when they were essentially told that one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises was a swindle. They laughed. That’s right, LAUGHED.
When I watched this, I rolled my eyes. Remember, this is one of the reddest areas of Michigan, and has been so for the better part of a century and a half. The voters here would vote for a comatose Republican. The fact that they can go from wild-eyed chants of “Lock her up!” to laughing at being told it was just a campaign ploy is a sad commentary on how polarized this country has become.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
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