Donald Trump hasn’t said too much about his administration’s scandalous new $1.7 billion fund — the president has had more items on his social media platform this week about renovation projects than the fund, for example. But a reporter nevertheless asked him Wednesday afternoon whether he had a response for critics, who have described the gambit as a “slush fund.”
True to form, the Republican’s answer meandered for a while and included dubious claims about his lack of involvement in the arrangement, before he got to the heart of the matter.
“People were destroyed,” Trump said, referring to his allies under the Biden administration. He added, “We’re reimbursing those people for their legal fees, and for their costs, and for anybody involved, but they destroyed people. … It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics, what they did.”
Just so we’re all clear about the context and relevant details, when the incumbent president identified “the most violent thing” he has ever seen in politics, he wasn’t talking about the insurrectionists who violently attacked the Capitol in his name while violently clashing with police officers as part of an unprecedented attack on American democracy.
Rather, Trump was instead talking about efforts to hold them and their allies accountable.
That’s utterly bonkers, though it was also a timely reminder that when Trump uses the word “violence,” he often means it as a synonym for stuff he doesn’t like.
Last summer, for example, the president spoke at a White House event and said, “What we found out is horrible that Obama and a group of thugs cheated on the elections. They cheated violently, viciously on the elections. They’re violent people.”
Trump was, of course, brazenly lying about what he and his team have “found out,” but the idea that anyone “cheated violently” added a bizarre twisted to his nonsensical conspiracy theories.
It wasn’t a one-off, however. During an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” last year, he argued that Joe Biden “went after” the cryptocurrency industry “violently.”
If the president wants to take seriously the scourge of political violence, that would be a welcome change. But what Trump seems far more eager to do is redefine the word “violence” in ways that he thinks suit his partisan purposes.
The post Trump’s absurd choice for the ‘the most violent thing’ he’s ever seen in politics appeared first on MS NOW.
