We must end Trump’s assault on norms of political civility by … assaulting the hell out of those same norms?
Don’t worry, I’m sure Waters believes he’s entitled to a criminal trial before he’s thrown in a dungeon.
We’re about 10 days into this Ukraine business and already we have the president demanding that the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee be arrested for treason and Waters insisting that Trump himself be sent to the hole. What are the tweets going to look like after he’s actually impeached?
I'm calling on the GOP to stop Trump's filthy talk of whistleblowers being spies & using mob language implying they should be killed. Impeachment is not good enough for Trump. He needs to be imprisoned & placed in solitary confinement. But for now, impeachment is the imperative.
— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) October 1, 2019
“The people who talk this way about Trump wouldn’t stop at Trump,” says Tim Carney. Indeed. This isn’t the first time she’s fantasized about locking Trump up either, notes The Hill. I can’t help but suspect that boasting to Republican voters that their favorite politician will lose not just office but his freedom if Democrats have their way isn’t the best pitch to win over righties troubled by the Ukraine business.
Meanwhile:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1179048439319072768
Hopefully someone’s explained to him by now that misleading the public about a conversation the president had, as Schiff did at last week’s hearing, is douchey and unfair but it isn’t “treason.” Next that person can explain to him why it’s not a crime of any sort. You don’t need to be a lawyer to be a good president but restraining your impulses to arrest your political opponents will at least get you in the ballpark of respecting the Constitution. To borrow Carney’s line, a person who talks this way about Schiff wouldn’t stop at Schiff.
One other wrinkle to Waters’s tweet. It’s basically Democratic boilerplate at this point that Trump deserves prison but claiming that he deserves solitary confinement is a strange flourish. I don’t know why Waters thought of that; all I can guess is that she wanted to suggest that Trump should be tortured, that “mere” prison is too good for him, and settled on solitary confinement as the most politically correct way to make that point. The irony is that that’s not really politically correct anymore among supporters of criminal justice reform. Paul Manafort’s stint in solitary confinement this past summer inspired a brief wave of commentary about how SC is in fact a form of torture, especially when it’s accompanied by draconian conditions like total darkness for most or all of the day. Waters is actually catching some flak from progressives for endorsing it on social media this afternoon. You have to go pretty far in insulting Trump for lefties to say, “Too far.”
Here’s Colbert last night with Hillary Clinton kicking off a “Lock! Him! Up!” chant among the faithful.
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