Whenever Donald Trump talks, it can feel as though a dystopian movie is playing out before our very eyes. But his latest campaign speech was a classic of its type – and even darker than usual.
On Monday, in Erie, Pennsylvania, he floated some thoughts on how he would combat rising crime against shopkeepers if he were re-elected president – and what he proposed was scarily close to the premise of the horror franchise, The Purge.
For those who have not seen the films, once a year, for 12 hours, all crime in America is legal, including murder, rape and arson. As police forces stand aside, everyone gets a free pass to act as they please.
Trump’s suggestion would apply the same principle to policing – allowing law-enforcement units to use “extraordinarily rough” tactics over the course of “one really violent day… and I mean real rough. Word will get out and [crime] will end immediately,” he said.
You can understand why many people have drawn comparisons with the dystopian action-horror flicks; the trailer for the 2018 film, The First Purge, even contained a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” tagline, seemingly predicting what was to come.
And it’s terrifying, not just because it’s coming from one of the most powerful people in the world: it’s dangerous rhetoric that, if I didn’t know better, sounds a lot like inciting a riot.
Others drew comparisons with Trump’s “lawless police” idea to Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass – the violent, co-ordinated attacks orchestrated by the Nazi regime against Germany’s Jewish population that took place in November 1938. “In The Purge, the police won’t respond to calls for help,” one journalist wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Trump is proposing a state pogrom in which police are empowered to murder marginalised people.”
Of course, it isn’t the first time the former president’s words have been laced with menace. A few weeks ago, he said that Jessica Leeds, one of the women who has accused Trump of sexual assault, would not have been his “chosen one”. During his presidential debate with Kamala Harris last month, he falsely claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets. During an official briefing at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, he suggested that Americans inject themselves with bleach.
And this is not the first time Trump has suggested violence as a solution. During a 70-minute address at his “Save America” rally on 6 January, 2021, Trump not only baselessly claimed that “we won this election, and we won by a landslide”, he told supporters gathered: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” before stating: “We are going to the Capitol.”
His lawyers have since argued that “fight” was meant figuratively, not literally. And, naturally, he did not go to the Capitol himself. But it’s no coincidence, in my opinion, that moments later, his devotees stormed the building in Washington DC and threatened to upend US democracy with deadly violence.
No, this latest rant is eerily familiar and full of foreboding – as though a warning of what could happen if he is not voted back in as president next month.
I often debate whether it’s a good thing to discuss Trump’s tirades, to give him more airtime than he should be given. But I also think, especially so close to the election, that it’s important to call out his threatening behaviour. We have all grown weary or accustomed to his sensationalist spiel – to the point we often turn the other cheek or tune out. But by doing so, we run the risk of history repeating itself, of his fanatics thinking these awful threats will go unchallenged.
