Trump’s closing SC argument: kill ’em all
by digby
I have been writing Trump’s torture and summary execution endorsements constantly since he first said it last fall. He is crazed on the subject. The mainstream press noted it in passing but didn’t seem to see it as anything unusual.
They are taking note of it more lately since he is getting increasingly bloodthirsty and outrageous when he discusses it. But it’s nothing new. This is about his last rally in South Carolina:
Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.
“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”
The story appears to be a hoax spread via e-mail forwards, according to rumor tracker Snopes.com, with no evidence it occurred.
The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”
Trump was unimpressed with waterboarding, a banned interrogation tactic that he has pledged to bring back against suspected terrorists, and supplement with far worse forms of abuse.
“Is it torture or not? It’s so borderline,” he said. “It’s like minimal, minimal, minimal torture.”
In a previous speech, Trump called his opponent Senator Ted Cruz, whose father was tortured as a young man in Cuba, a “pu**y” for not sharing his zeal for the practice.
Trump went on to boast how fears of terrorism had boosted him politically, including in South Carolina where he leads a number of polls by double-digit margins.
“When Paris happened, everyone started saying, ‘We want Trump!’” he said. “The polls came in, 60 percent, 70 percent, 72 percent. This is 72 percent with 17 people running. Now we’re down to 6, we got rid of all these people. It’s so great. It’s so great.”
[…]
Trump’s speech was a hit with the audience, which cheered throughout.Trump supporter Eleanor Crume, 72, told MSNBC afterwards that she agreed with Trump’s stance on waterboarding because terrorists should not be “pampered.”
“We need someone who can lead the country because people are scared to death,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time before terrorists come and start chopping Christian heads off in the United States.”
South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Henry McMaster, Trump’s most prominent endorser in the state, set the tone for the event before Trump came on.
“How many of you feel real safe right now?”
“Nooooooooo!” the audience droned in response.
“We’re gonna change that,” he replied.
Here’s the Youtube o the speech last night. If you want to see the sick torture part, start at 29:00 in.
It’s not just the fact that Trump says this horrific, evil stuff that’s so awful. It’s that his audience screams in ecstasy when he says it.
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