Advertisem*nt
WASHINGTON POST
Trump suggests if elected he could take revenge on political enemies
Former president Donald Trump has in recent days been escalating his suggestions that he could prosecute his political enemies if elected in November.
In interviews broadcast on Thursday and earlier this week, Trump’s remarks demonstrated how he is trying to put his legal troubles on the ballot as a referendum on the American justice system and the rule of law. His allies in the Republican Party have also joined his calls for revenge prosecutions and other retaliatory measures against Democrats in response to his felony convictions by a jury in a New York court on 34 charges.
Trump was offered several opportunities by sympathetic interviewers in recent days to clarify or walk back his previous statements. Trump instead defended his position, saying at points that “I don’t want to look naive” and that “sometimes revenge can be justified.”
Dr. Phil McGraw, the television host and a self-described donor to Trump’s campaign, brought up the former president’s previous statements in an interview that ran on Thursday and gave him an opportunity to say, as McGraw put it: “Enough is enough. Too much is too much. This is a race to the bottom, and it stops here. It stops now.”
Advertisem*nt
Trump initially responded, “I’m OK with that,” but then added, “Sometimes, I’m sure in certain moments I wouldn’t be, you know, when you go through what I’ve been through.”
Then, when McGraw said that revenge and retribution were unhealthy for the country and that Trump did not have time to “get even,” the former president replied: “Revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I have to be honest — sometimes it can.”
In an interview with Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, that was broadcast Wednesday night, Trump was also offered several opportunities to pledge he would not carry out “retribution” against his political opponents.
Trump was asked to respond to critics who fear he would look for “retribution” if he wins in November and returns to the White House. “So No. 1, they’re wrong,” he said. “It has to stop because otherwise we’re not going to have a country.”
Trump instead said that “based on what they’ve done” — referring to Democrats — “I would have every right to go after them.”
He added, “And it’s easy, because it’s Joe Biden, and you see all the criminality, all of the money that’s going into the family and him.”
Hannity then pushed the former president to condemn “this practice of weaponization.”
Trump replied: “You have to do it. But it’s awful — look, I know you want me to say something so nice,” but, he added, “I don’t want to look naive.”
The former president was also asked, in an interview with ABC15 News in Arizona that aired Thursday, about prosecuting his opponents, and he suggested he was considering it.
Advertisem*nt
“I thought it would be a horrible thing to do to Hillary Clinton,” Trump said, repeating a recent false suggestion that he had never called to “lock up” Clinton. But he added: “The world is different now. So when you ask me the question, would we do it? I’ll talk to you in about three years from now.”
On Tuesday, he also suggested his opponents could face prosecution.
“You know, it’s a very terrible thing. It’s a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Trump told Newsmax host Greg Kelly when asked whether the conviction could help him politically.
He added, “So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
NEW YORK TIMES
Trump uses term ‘Holocaust’ in talking about migrant children
Donald Trump used the term “Holocaust,” which usually refers to Nazi Germany’s industrial murder of 6 million Jews, to characterize a misleading claim about migrant children in the United States.
The presumptive Republican nominee was responding to reports that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for unaccompanied minors at the border, received no response to follow-up phone calls for 85,000 migrant children. The children and their sponsors are not required to answer, and HHS says 81 percent of the checkups are successful.
Republicans have seized on the statistic to misleadingly claim that 85,000 children are “missing” or have been forced into “slavery.” A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation last year found some migrants being exploited for child labor, but not all of the 85,000 who were no longer in contact with HHS.
Advertisem*nt
In an interview that aired Thursday with the television personality Dr. Phil, Trump repeated the misleading claim about missing migrant children, inflating the number to 88,000 and describing it as “a Holocaust.”
“You know, we have 88,000 missing children now,” he said. “Can you imagine if that were Trump that had 88,000 missing children, 88,000? That’s a Holocaust. That’s as bad as, I mean, think of it.”
Trump has made immigration a central message of his campaign, often using exaggerated and inflammatory language to describe the surge in southern border crossings. He has vilified and dehumanized migrants by describing them in broad strokes as dangerous criminals, terrorists, mentally ill and carriers of diseases. He has repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” which historians said resembled the propaganda of Adolf Hitler.
The Holocaust is the largest and most extensively documented genocide in world history, a systematic campaign of state-sponsored persecution and extermination by Nazi Germany against European Jews and other minority groups between 1933 and 1945, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The methods of murder included mass shootings, large-scale detention and labor camps, poison gas chambers, and ovens. The victims included an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children, according to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, known as Yad Vashem.
“It’s really inappropriate to compare that to the Holocaust,” said Laurie Marhoefer, a history professor at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “The numbers of people are astronomically larger. Those aren’t people who are murdered. He’s just trying to whip up some kind of emotion by using that term. It’s dangerous and it’s really a distortion of what he’s talking about and also a gross misrepresentation of the actual Holocaust.”
Advertisem*nt
WASHINGTON POST
Get Today in Politics
A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday.
