Trump on theft: If you had one really violent day.. .. … One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. pic.twitter.com/DkOdULcV32
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 29, 2024
If Trump just got all of his ideas from B movies, he would have much better ideas.
He needs to start talking about The Running Man and Death Race 2000 next.
We need to just go full-on at this point.
Donald Trump has been accused of invoking plotlines similar to The Purge – a dystopian horror film in which officially sanctioned murder is occasionally legal – as a possible solution to crime in the US after saying it could be eradicated in “one really violent day”.
In what was seen as an extreme display of demagoguery even by his standards, Trump drew cheers from an audience in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a picture of an out-of-control crime spree that he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”.
So true.
“You see these guys walking out with air conditioners with refrigerators on their back, the craziest thing,” Trump said. “And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension.
“They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them, and they want to destroy our country.”
In a passage that provoked a storm on social media, the former president and Republican nominee then said: “If you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example, where, when they start walking out with …”
He then trailed off in a digression to falsely accuse Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, of introducing a practice in California when she was attorney general that exonerated thieves from prosecution of items worth less than $950.
Politico said the remark appeared to be a reference to proposition 47, which downgraded some offenses from felonies to misdemeanor and was signed into law by the state’s former Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, four years before Harris took office.
Linking that issue to his theme, Trump continued: “You saw kids walk in with calculators. They didn’t want to go over the $950. They’re standing with calculators adding it up. You know, these are smart, smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught.
“Now, if you had one really violent day … one rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.”
The comments triggered a stream of comparisons to The Purge, a 2013 film that depicts the election of a radical new party called The New Founding Fathers of America following an economic collapse, which then enacts drastic policies to end crime and unemployment.
It’s a good idea.
We’ve got big problems.
We need a purge.
🔴 Trump obliterates Kamala’s record on crime: “She destroyed California.”
“She had a policy: if you steal less than $950, you’re allowed to keep it. You can go. We’re not going to prosecute. So criminals are walking into stores—mean, nasty guys, rough guys, and they take… pic.twitter.com/a3I1T0iFkJ
— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) August 24, 2024
In California, people are only allowed to steal $950 per day. pic.twitter.com/kDXlIVkWs8
— SULLY (@SULLY10X) August 27, 2024
The film had some gay social commentary about, you know, rich people (or whatever). At least the first one did, the sequels presumably just became splatterfests (as is generally the case with sequels to high-concept horror films).
But regardless of whatever the creators’ comments on society were meant to be, the concept in its literal form is a good idea.