The violence of Donald Trump’s rhetoric is accelerating on his way down
Like most people of the liberal persuasion I am opposed to the death penalty. But unlike most people of the liberal persuasion my reasons for my opposition are not, strictly speaking, the usual ones.
Of course I acknowledge that capital punishment is unfairly applied to persons of colour, and too often it is handed down to innocent people, and I completely agree that both instances are hideously wrong miscarriages of justice. But those undeniable facts are incidental. They don’t address the central question of why capital punishment is wrong in and of itself, they only address instances in which it has been misapplied. It’s as if the speaker is saying that the death penalty would be okay as long as it’s applied uniformly to white people and people of colour and never to innocent people.
For me that’s avoiding the central point, and the central point is this. The act of taking my life away from me or your life away from you is what despots do. It’s a tool tailor-made for fascistic, repressive dictatorships. It’s the preferred weapon of the reign of terror. It’s the final proof that our lives and our freedoms are not our own, and any pretence to the contrary is an illusion, even a conceit. No one is truly free in any nation so long as that nation can take their lives away from them.
It may sound like a technicality but it does matter, to me at least. I am glad I live in a nation where capital punishment is looked upon as barbaric. I breathe freer here than I would in, say, Florida or Texas. And it’s not because I have any intention of committing a crime that could get me hauled down to the local death house, either. It’s because the threat of death is a tool of tyranny, and tyrannies are the worst form of government.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the last prime minister of Great Britain to posit the reinstatement of the death penalty was Margaret Thatcher. Her good friend Ronald Reagan was likewise a fan. So were the two Bushes, George W and George HW. So is Donald Trump. I hope you’re beginning to see a pattern here. They’re all conservatives, the last outpost on the road to the final, fascistic destination along the political continuum.
Conservatives frequently tip their hands with the bloodthirsty and arbitrary zeal with which they yield the threat of death. For example, just when I think Donald Trump can’t stoop any further in asserting proof of his unfitness to occupy any position of power anywhere, he went on “Truth” Social Tuesday and insisted that Hunter Biden should have been given the death penalty for paying his taxes late. Trump suggested that the prosecutor, David Weiss, who made a deal with Hunter Biden, “gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.”
Now I won’t spend any time dissecting what a horrid act of hypocrisy that is. It’s immediately obvious to anyone with a brain. The larger point is that Trump’s first impulse is to employ judicial murder to attack his perceived enemies, and he thinks nothing of calling on the death penalty for a minor infraction of the law. And I’ll go ahead and say it, if the law were uniformly applied in that way Donald Trump would have never made it to his 20th birthday.
That Trump is once again calling for the judicial murder of people he hates is a grim reminder of just how dangerous he is. It’s also a reminder of how sick the Republican Party has become. These days Republicans are all about taking vengeance. They’re all about punishing and hurting and murdering people they dislike, from members of the LGBTQ+ community to people of colour to liberals in general.
Trump and his party want to do harm to Americans of whom they have irrational, hysterical terror. That is why they are no longer a party but an aberration, an abomination, an insurrection. That is why they must be stopped. That is why we must be the ones to stop them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.