A day after an article in Politico attempted to tie Donald Trump to David Duke and the alt-right and white nationalist movements, Trump’s son Eric went on the radio to try to distance his father from them—by saying Duke deserves “a bullet.”
KHOW host Ross Kaminsky called the report “one of the most obvious hit pieces of all time” but said it raised an issue that the Trump campaign still needs to deal with.
The article, “How White Nationalists Learned To Love Donald Trump,” suggested that Trump has given a voice to the so-called alt-right. “Whether deliberately or not,” J.M. Berger wrote, “the candidate, his son Donald Jr. and his surrogates have circulated white nationalist messages and imagery online.” Berger noted that Trump at first dodged the question of whether to reject the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. However, Duke’s endorsement was the impetus for the coalescing of white nationalist support for Trump, according to the Politico piece.
Kaminsky told Eric Trump that Politico “showed this picture of David Duke, a guy who desperately needs a bullet in the head as far as I can tell.” He added, “They showed him walking down the street smiling and basically they’re trying to tie him into support of your dad’s campaign and they’re going to be poll watchers in places.” He went on to blame the left for their efforts to portray the Trump campaign as an “arm of some white nationalist movement or something.”
Eric, of course, responded with all the class and civility one has come to expect from a Trump surrogate.
“Ross, it’s disgusting, and I think, by the way, if I said exactly what you said, I’d get killed for it but I think I’ll say it anyway,” Trump told the Denver host. “The guy does deserve a bullet. I mean, these aren’t good people. These are horrible people.”
He went on to say that he commends his father’s efforts to help the African American community. “He’s said, ‘What’s happened to the African American community is horrible and I’m going to take care of it.”
He went on to decry the 60% unemployment rate “in some of these cities” and the violence in Chicago, saying that his father plans to rebuild these areas putting a “disproportionate amount of attention” on them. Trump said, “I give him tremendous credit for that.”
“A guy like David Duke is disgusting. But this is the MO of the DNC and in fact, we go back to the Podesta emails from May/June, there’s an email where he’s saying, ‘Listen, we think Trump has an amazing movement going and we want to make him, the only way we think we can best stop is to make him look like a bigot, racist, xenophobic, this and that.’”
“These are our politicians and I’m disgusted. I’m disgusted by this process and so many of the people that we have in Washington, D.C.,” he said.
Maybe Trump thinks all of those disgusting people also “deserve a bullet”? What else are you supposed to do when you have so many “not good people” running around Washington?
Eric Trump probably didn’t see the irony, but he went on to condemn Democratic operatives, exposed by Project Veritas, who intentionally set out to cause violence at Trump events. “They’re paying people to go and incite riots in cities like Chicago at rallies. I mean, they’re paying people!” Trump exclaimed. “This is a person who had been at the White House 350 times, who was paid by the DNC and he’s admitting on secret video that he was paid to incite violence at Trump rallies.”
I guess inciting violence is ok as long as no filthy lucre is involved.
There is something seriously wrong with anyone who even jokes about something like this. We don’t fight racism in this country—or defend against charges of it—with bullets, and we shouldn’t even jest about it.
This has gone way beyond “Trump fights” and the anti-PC arguments. One may have the right to say that someone deserves a bullet (although that’s not an absolute right in all circumstances), but it’s not wise, it’s not civil, and it’s not decent. It says something dreadful about us as Americans that we would tolerate this from a top political surrogate—and that some would even celebrate it as progress. In fact what we’re seeing indicates a sort of political and civil entropy which, if allowed to continue, could destroy our republic if we’re not careful.
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