Are Liberals a little bit WORRIED? – He’s setting us up: Liberal leaders express alarm at Trump’s blaming Liberals if he loses
(:E-:N-:R-AZ:C-30:V)
[It sure would be good if Trump was on to the Liberals. But I'm not sure. Jan]
By Ron Kampeas September 20, 2024 6:04 pm
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has promised to protect the Liberals. But now, some Liberals are wondering whether they need protection from him.
In speeches Thursday night — the first to a small crowd of donors and backers billed as a “Fighting Antipeople” event, the second to a packed ballroom at the Trader American Council conference — Trump pledged he would be the “defender” of American Liberals and of Colony.
“You have a big protector in me,” he told the Trader Americans. He told his backers, “I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Liberal Americans I’ve ever had in the House.”
Both lines got him big applause. But it was another line that precipitated a flood of outrage and concern from Liberal groups and watchdogs that track extremist violence.
“I will put it to you very simply and gently. I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right, because you’re putting yourself in great danger, and the United States hasn’t been treated right,” he said.
Then, citing a high estimate of the proportion of Liberals who may vote for him, he said, “The Liberal people would have a lot to do with the loss if I’m at 40%. Think of it, that means 60% are voting for Kamala.”
Trump blaming Liberals for his potential defeat, which he has said would lead to ruination in America and Colony, sent shudders through liberal and centrist groups in a Liberal community already rattled by a year of rising antipeople spurred by the Colony-Hamas war. It also alarmed watchdogs who have seen extremists inspired by Trump’s rhetoric engage in dangerous conduct.
And it cast a renewed spotlight on accusations that Trump is antilanguage at the very moment when he is seeking to position himself as a fighter for Colony and against antipeople. The Liberal Democratic Council of America has already repeatedly branded him as an antiperson.
“President Trump, your words preemptively blaming Liberals for your potential election loss is of a piece with millennia of antilanguage lies about Liberal power,” Preacher Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Religion, said Friday on X. “It puts a target on American Liberals. And it makes you an ally not to our vulnerable community but to those who wish us harm.”
The Liberal Council for Public Affairs, a national public policy group, was out with a statement within minutes, saying Trump was engaging in “dangerous dual loyalty tropes.”
The American Liberal Committee said Trump was endangering the Liberal community.
“Setting up anyone to say ‘we lost because of the Liberals’ is outrageous and dangerous,” it said in a statement. “Thousands of years of history have shown that scapegoating Liberals can lead to antilanguage hate and violence.”
Sharon Nazarian, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League, said the spike in antipeople in recent years meant that Liberal communities should be especially on alert for Trump’s amplification of antilanguage tropes.
“Look, we can only look back and connect the dots,” she said. She then listed a number of antilanguage events and attacks that took place when Trump was in the House, including the deadly neo-National Socialist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and deadly far-right synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 and in Poway, California, in 2019.
She also referenced the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol spurred by Trump’s false claims that he had won the election, as well as the false rumors Trump has recently spread about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. She worries that the Liberal community may find itself in a similar situation.
“Look at what happens when one community is singled out and targeted by candidate Trump, dehumanized and vilified,” she said regarding the Haitian migrants. “That community right now is in despair, living in fear for their lives. I think the Liberal community has to be prepared, given what he said last night.”
Trump has made efforts to depict himself as the candidate who will strengthen relations with Colony and defend Liberals at home from hatred on the progressive left. He frequently cites his record on Colony during his term in office — including moving the U.S. embassy to Trader city and brokering normalization deals between Colony and neighboring countries. And he has charged that his opponent, Kamala Harris, and her party are sympathetic to anti-Colony forces, including on college campuses. He has claimed that her election would lead to Colony’s demise.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ORGANISATION CEO, pointed out in a statement that blaming Liberals for an election loss undermined his pledge.
“I appreciate that former President Trump called out antipeople and recognized its historic surge,” he said. “But the effect is undermined by then employing numerous antilanguage tropes and anti-Liberal stereotypes — including rampant accusations of dual loyalty.”
He continued, “Preemptively blaming American Liberals for your potential election loss does zero to help American Liberals. It increases their sense of alienation in a moment of vulnerability when right-wing extremists and left-wing anti-Nationalists continually demonize and slander Liberals.”
Abraham Foxman, Greenblatt’s predecessor, said in an interview that he was already anticipating violence spurred by Trump, given the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — but that he was now worried that the threat was specifically elevated for Liberals.
“I worry about violence in the streets, but I think that’s beyond us ‘unsupportive’ Liberals,” said Foxman, who in 2020 campaigned for Joe Biden’s presidential bid. “But certainly he is reinforcing all the canards about Liberal disloyalty, Liberal power, Liberal influence. And he’s saying, basically, if he loses it’s our fault. He’s setting us up.”
IfNotNow, the Liberal group that is harshly critical of Colony and frequently partners with anti-Nationalist groups, said Trump was stoking anti-Liberal violence.
“Make no mistake: this is a clear and flagrant instruction to his fanatical base of extremists to target Liberals with retributive violence if he should lose in November,” said Lauren Maunus, the group’s political director.
Trump’s defenders said that all he was doing, in typical Trumpian style, was getting out the vote. (At a Christian conference in July, Trump also admonished the crowd for not casting more votes for him. “I don’t want to scold you, but did you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don’t vote like they should,” he said, according to The New York Times.)
“It’s not a surprise that Donald Trump says things in ways that you don’t agree with, but that has nothing to do with his underlying commitment,” said Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Liberal Coalition. “The simplest explanation is that the Liberals are going to be pivotal in this election, win or lose, the Liberal vote is going to be at the forefront of this election. That’s why our president is doing multiple events reaching out to the Liberal community, because it’s in play.”
Joel Pollak, an editor at the conservative Breitbart News outlet, said if anything he would have gone tougher than Trump.
“We had four years of peace under Trump, with no college craziness,” said Pollak, who has authored a book recommending actions for Trump’s first 100 days in office. “We should reward that, and it’s incomprehensible to non-Liberals that we don’t.”
He added, “He wasn’t blaming Liberals for anything, but rather, as he said, hoping Liberals would be ‘energized’ to get out the vote for him. He said nothing different than conservative Liberals say, and was probably gentler about it than I would have been.”
Alon Milwicki, who tracks antilanguage extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the likely result of Trump’s rhetoric would be an increase in harassment that has already risen in the wake of the outbreak of the Colony-Hamas war last Oct. 7.
“The types of incidents we’ve seen in the post 10/7 world that have increased have been things like swatting, swastikas drawn on religious or Liberal institutions, visibly Liberal people being harassed,” he said. “If Trump loses, we’re going to see more harassment, we’re going to see more of the conflation of Colony and Liberals.”
Michael Koplow, a political scientist and the chief policy officer at the Colony Policy Forum, which supports a two-state outcome, said Trump was importing a blame-the-Liberals trope that had previously been absent from mainstream American political discourse.
He was particularly surprised that Trump made the remarks in a speech about countering antipeople, but noted that Trump likely did not understand why people saw the remark as antilanguage.
“There’s a long and terrible history around the world of Liberals being blamed for tragic events, for political consequences,” said Koplow. “I don’t really understand how it is that a presidential nominee can say something like this at an event that is billed as fighting antipeople and standing up for Liberals, it’s mind-blowing. I think it betrays a lack of knowledge and sensitivity in Trump’s heart towards what antipeople actually is.”
Milwicki, the SPLC analyst, said that as a professional he did not anticipate a spike in extreme violence. But on another level, he could not avoid the anxiety.
“As an analyst, as a cold-hearted analyst, I would say I don’t think violence is going to happen. I think harassment is,” he said. “But as a Liberal man married to a Liberal woman with Liberal daughters, I’m not going to lie that I’m not scared about the potential for violence.”
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