Trump’s recent rhetoric reminds us who he is — and why he’s unfit to lead

It’s a disturbing oddity of our current political era that a leading presidential candidate can suggest that an American general who has criticized him should be executed, that shoplifters should be shot on sight, that the federal government should crack down on a television network whose coverage he doesn’t like and that an elderly man being attacked with a hammer is joke-worthy — and no one bats an eye.

The above-referenced lunacy all came from (where else?) the twisted mind, mouth and fingers of former President Donald Trump. And that was just within the past few weeks.

Reach back to last year, and Trump was suggesting that the U.S. Constitution should be suspended to allow his return to office. Reach back to Jan. 6, 2021, and he was directing his deranged followers to “fight like hell” to prevent certification of valid election results, fueling the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol that day.

Reach back further still, and this silver-spoon draft evader was slandering war heroes (“I like people who weren’t captured”), whitewashing the Tiki-torch-carrying neo-nazis of Charlottesville (“very fine people on both sides”) and extolling the virtues of sexual assault (“grab them by the …”).

So yes, Trump has been a rhetorical dirty bomb throughout his eight years at the center of the nation’s political stage. So much so that pausing now to note his latest verbal assaults against democratic norms and basic decency might feel redundant.

But Trump’s latest unhinged utterances are important to note here for two reasons:

One, the very phenomenon of the normalization of his psychotic rhetoric is in itself dangerous. The mere fact that he spews so much verbal sewage that the culture has gotten used to it shouldn’t provide a pass to a man who, according to polls, has as much chance of being the next president as does the sitting one.

And two, Trump’s alwaystoxic rhetoric seems to be getting worse lately, in quantifiable ways. To the extent this is because he understands he has a real possibility of returning to the White House, and is signaling his intentions upon getting there, the nation should listen.

As is so often the case with Trump, some of his worst recent rhetoric was aimed at someone formerly in his own inner circle — in this case,

Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the final months of Trump’s presidency.

It was during that tumultuous period, as Trump was attempting to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, that Milley assured his Chinese counterparts during a phone call that the U.S. government was stable.

That call, made at the behest of Defense Secretary

Mark Esper, was perfectly appropriate, given the world’s trepidation about the turmoil within the U.S. government at that moment. Yet during a rant against Milley on his Truth Social media platform last month, Trump called it “a treasonous act,” one “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

That kind of wink-and-nod threat is easily translated by the more deranged of Trump’s followers — as former Vice President Mike Pence could attest, having narrowly escaped being lynched by the MAGA mob on Jan. 6 after being publicly accused by Trump of disloyalty for refusing to help him steal the election.

Trump also recently enthusiastically told a California crowd of his solution for confronting retail theft: “You can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”

“Shot!” he repeated, as the room cheered.

Then there was Trump’s social media attack just last week on a law clerk involved in his pending business fraud civil trial in New York. The attack included the clerk’s photo and identifying information, prompting the judge in the case to issue a gag order.

All of this oratorical poison should be considered in the context of a second Trump presidential term that would be different from the first in dangerous ways.

Trump and his allies have been open about their plans to remove many of the institutional restraints on the presidency should he return to it, in part by recategorizing wide swaths of federal employees so they could be replaced at will with Trump loyalists.

And with Trump having had four years to practice pushing the levers of power, it’s unlikely that people like Milley — the institutionalists inside the White House who restrained Trump’s worst impulses last time — will be positioned to provide those guardrails this time.

With that in mind, Trump’s recent rhetoric is not merely disgusting but alarming. He has, to paraphrase the famous warning from Maya Angelou, reminded us who he is. On that issue, if on no others, America should believe him.