It’s just too much
Nearing the end of his speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Chris Christie paused.
It wasn’t just that the crowd was chanting — that, he expected. The New Jersey governor was in the middle of an attack on Hillary Clinton, listing what he saw as her many missteps as secretary of state. After each perceived misstep, he asked the crowd, “Is she guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty!” the crowd thundered back again and again.
But this time, it sounded different. Christie looked down and to his left, at the enormous California delegation, momentarily distracted. Or perhaps it was Pennsylvania, Ohio or Maryland delegates. They were chanting.
His eyes narrowed for a moment, seeking out the disruption. But then a smile slowly took over his face. He nodded as he figured out what they were saying. The chant swelled to a roar, and delegates began standing up from their seats. They waved their red, white and blue “Trump” signs. They shook their fists. They screamed and hollered and made the building shake, in that now-familiar three-beat chant:
“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”
It’s hard to say definitively if that was the first time the most popular chant of Donald Trump’s campaign was uttered, but by the next evening, it was a go-to refrain, punctuating every mention of Clinton’s name.
It fit right in with Trump’s core pitch to voters: that Clinton couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted. His fans broke out in the chant at any mention of the Clinton Foundation, the email server or any other of his attacks on her.
Of course, that wasn’t his only position. At times, Trump’s rhetoric shifted, and he insisted that a better path would be beating her on Nov. 8. “Let’s just beat her in November,” he told supporters at a rally on July 29 in Colorado Springs just after the Democratic convention — a line he repeated at various campaign rallies over the course of the fall.
But for the most part, he took a hard line — including when speaking with Clinton herself. “And I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception,” he said at the Oct. 9 presidential debate. “There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”
In Florida on Oct. 12, he told the crowd that “this corruption and collusion is just one more reason why I will ask my attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor,” and later adding, “She has to go to jail.”
He actually said “she has to go to jail” a lot:
Now it may be coming back to haunt him. Chris Hayes had a good segment on this. It continues to incense me that after all he and his sycophantic cult did with the “lock her up” and “she has to go to jail” chants, he had the brass to steal hundreds of classified documents and store them in his hotel storage room. It’s unbelievable.