Broken Promises Week, Part I: "Lock Her Up!"

I was all set to write a post about this topic last week but got distracted by the many excellent articles out there that I thought needed an airing. The more I’ve thought about this particular issue, however, the more I see it as emblematic of Donald Trump’s entire campaign and now, scarily, a precursor of how he will run his Presidency. As we move forward (notice how I keep using this phrase, as my purpose is to apply the lessons of the campaign to the mess we’re in now, not, as I’ve said, to “re-fight the election.”)

So what’s the big deal? As with many aspects of now-President-elect Trump’s behavior (and, one could say, his campaign as a whole) what started out as a stunt got taken seriously, and now (sorry to use this crashing cliche) the genie is out of the bottle. To watch scenes from Trump rallies, with people having a great time prancing around in orange jumpsuits and (sometimes) waving nooses (or wearing the ever-popular “Trump that Bitch” t-shirts, the only slogan I can bring myself to quote in this article) with the detestable Rudy Giuliani egging on all the fun, and then to see our now-soon-to-be-President joining in with, “Lock her up is right,” or hint that “Second Amendment people” could perhaps do something about her, to hear in the second debate Trump tell Clinton “you’d be in jail” if she lost . . . all of this is entirely outside the norms of political discourse in this country. Sure, there were some pretty vile things said in newspapers and pamphlets during election seasons in early America (I have one such example posted at the end of this article), but the candidate himself wasn’t the one leading the jeers, and name-calling was about as far as it went. But hey, Debi, lighten up! Everybody was having a high old time. What larks! Who cares?

As Election Day approached and it looked like a sure thing that Trump was going to lose, there were specific and inexcusable threats from Trump supporters of violence. (The violence that did happen, from Clinton supporters, was also inexcusable. Why do people think that smashing windows makes a political statement? Without in any way condoning the destruction and attacks that happened, I do think it is fair to say that there would have been many times more of this sort of despicable behavior had Trump lost because it was specifically promised.)

So now, last Sunday, the President-elect appeared for his first interview since the election on, where else? TV. Heaven forbid that he give a normal press conference where he might be faced with, you know, unexpected questions. And he was asked about his promise to prosecute his opponent. Here’s the relevant quotation from the interview:

“I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them,” he said. “They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them. And I will give you a very, very good and definitive answer the next time we do 60 Minutes together.”

In other words, “I was only kidding!”

A couple of tweets from Trump supporters in answer to this:

Hillary & Bill are “nice people”? Trump doesn’t want to “hurt them” by investigating? Can I have my vote back??

“You said you will lock her or up or at least try!! Do what you say! That’s why we voted for you.”

My brother-in-law has said that he’s seeing some of the same type of anger by Trump supporters as they see their candidate walk back in this and various other so-called promises. It’s a classic “good new/bad news” situation. The good news is, voters are paying attention to what their candidate is actually saying now that they’ve elected him and realizing that he meant almost none of it, the bad news is, they shouldn’t have cheered those promises in the first place.

The worrying thing: Now that this level of threatened violence has entered our political discourse, who’s going to want to run for office? Maybe only those who are willing to meet violence with violence, hmmm?

Here’s the invective promised from an early campaign, the 1800 contest between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams:

Things got ugly fast. Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.

Whew!