Donald Trump has no filter - and that’s served him well.
Much to the chagrin of the GOP establishment and much to the horror of voters who believe America’s commander-in-chief should aspire to some modicum of political correctness, an endless stream vitriol emanates from Trump’s mouth and none of it, no matter how inflammatory, dents his poll numbers.
Over the last nine months, Trump has called Mexicans rapists, derided John McCain’s war record, accused Fox’s Megyn Kelly of asking unfair questions because she was “bleeding out of her wherever,” and called for a wholesale ban on Muslims. And his support has only grown. One anomalous WSJ poll released on Friday notwithstanding, Trump's support at the national level among registered Republicans is unwavering with most forecasting a double-digit lead for the billionaire.
“I could go out into the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump famously said.
Well on Friday, Trump took it up a notch in a rambling South Carolina speech that touched on a laundry list of seemingly unrelated topics from heroin to Haruhiko Kuroda to torture.
“Is it torture or not? It’s so borderline,” he said, referring to waterboarding, which he claimssure he’ll bring back as president. “It’s like minimal, minimal, minimal torture.”
We’re not sure what “minimal” means in the context of “torture,” but Trump went on to explain that if America’s leaders would only get “tougher,” we wouldn’t have a terror problem.
What does Trump mean by “tougher,” you ask? Well for one thing, he likes the idea of executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. “He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to a myth about General John Pershing killing 49 Muslim prisoners in the Philippines. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”
Okay.
He also suggested that if only the San Bernardino massacre had devolved into a shootout between Syed Farook, Tashfeen Malik, and the dozens of public sector employees gathered for an office party, everyone would have been much safer. “If there were guns on the other side pointed at the other direction so the bullets are flying both ways you wouldn’t have had that happen,” he insisted. Well, yes, you would. Only instead of 2 people firing, you'd have 20.
While we certainly agree that on an individual level, being armed will improve your chances of survival in the event that you find yourself involved in a mass shooting, it's not exactly clear why dozens of people firing handguns in all directions Wild West-style is a particularly desirable situation.
In any event it doesn't matter. Trump is on a roll and in the eyes of his supporters he can do no wrong.
"It’s only a matter of time before terrorists come and start chopping Christian heads off in the United States,” Trump supporter Eleanor Crume, 72, told MSNBC.
Right. But not if Trump executes them with bullets dipped in pigs blood first.
(pig's blood comments begin at 33:00)