It Begins at the Top

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up....some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” -Hillary Clinton, 9/9/16

 An "America First" (according to her bio) tweeter, with, according to Elon Musk, 347,300 followers on X:

“President Trump is trying to silence me, threatening to kill me for saying what is true”

WTF is he talking about?! Trump has never threatened to k@ll him. What an outrageous lie!

pic.twitter.com/mxyxrqR7qu

— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) December 1, 2025

On November 20, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt  had told reporters

that President Trump does not want to execute members of Congress who urged the military not to follow unlawful orders, but that he wants to see them “held accountable.”

Trump earlier Thursday responded to a video made by six Democrats with military and intelligence backgrounds, calling it “seditious behavior from traitors” and later posting “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

“Does the president want to execute members of Congress?” a reporter asked Leavitt.

“No,” Leavitt said. “Many in this room want to talk about the president’s response, but not what brought the president to responding in this way."

Well, hey, whenever a President calls for the  execution of a specific American- six, in this case- it tends to be a topic of conversation.  As Senator Kelly put it in the video above, "seeing that video, here is how any other President would have responded. They would have said two words: "of course. But that's not how this President responded."

Any other President would have but Donald Trump has a very different vision of America. The Arizona senator added

My family knows the cost of political violence. My wife Gabby was shot in the head and nearly died while speaking to her constituents. The President should understand this, too. He has been the target of political violence by himself. The Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Elizabeth Hortman, and her husband were murdered in their home this year. The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, had his house firebombed this year. 

Then, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, a place I had visited just a few weeks ago with Republican senator John Curtis. Faced with a wave like this, every other President we have ever had in the history of this nation would have tried to heal the nation. But we all know Donald Trump. He uses every single opportunity to divide us.

Shortly after the murder of Charlie Kirk, Donald was aske on Fox News how his Administration would stem extremism of the left and the right and commented

I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. They're saying "We don't wan these people coming here. And we don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. 

The radicals on the left are the problem. They're vicious and they're horrible. And they're politically savvy, although they want men in women's sports. They want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.

Violence from the right, according to a President who evidently views it as righteous,  is driven by opposition to crime. Donald was criticized for these remarks but only modestly.

Contrast to the outrage- the ongoing outrage- over Hillary Clinton's remarks on the campaign trail in September of 2016.  She described "basket of deplorables" as "the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic- you name it.  It remains a cliche in national politics as if the candidate had been condemning all of Donald Trump's supporters.  However, a moment later, she noted that Trump "tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric and

Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

And so the guy who defeated Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 charges six members of Congress with seditious behavior, says the penalty for that is death, and some of his supporters appear to believe that Trump has not threatened the lives of those Democrats. The greater problem, as Hillary Clinton would realize, occurs when the President's spokesperson is hateful, dishonest, or evasive.  Donald Trump selected a press secretary in his mold, and she never disappoints.

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