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Trump Says ‘Second Amendment People’ ‘Can Do’ Something About Hillary Clinton

Trump Says ‘Second Amendment People’ ‘Can Do’ Something About Hillary Clinton

WILMINGTON, N.C. (Reuters) – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that gun rights activists could act to stop his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton from nominating liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices, igniting yet another firestorm of criticism just as he sought to steer clear of controversy.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” Trump said at a rally. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” he continued. The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantees a right to bear firearms.

Until Trump made the remark, he had been trying to rally Republican voters behind him and against Clinton, who is leading in national opinion polls in the race for the Nov. 8 election. Some in the audience who were seated behind Trump could be seen wincing when he made the comment.

Clinton’s campaign called the remark “dangerous.”

“A person seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way,” it said.

When asked to clarify what Trump meant, his campaign said Trump was referring to getting supporters of the Second Amendment to rally votes for Trump in the election.

“It’s called the power of unification – 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power,” the Trump campaign statement said.

Introducing Trump at a later rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused the news media of taking the remark out of context to help Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, get elected.

“What he meant by that (remark) was you have the power to vote against her,” he said to cheers. “You have the power to speak against her. You know why? Because you’re Americans.”

“It proves that most of the press is in the tank for Hillary Clinton,” he added. “They are doing everything they can to destroy Donald Trump.”

The U.S. Secret Service, which provides security details for both Trump and Clinton and rarely comments on political matters, said when asked for a response to Trump: “The Secret Service is aware of the comment.”

By day’s end, Trump was drawing criticism on several fronts, another chapter in a campaign marked by bitterness and partisanship.

Michael Hayden, a former CIA director who on Monday was among 50 Republican national security experts to denounce Trump in a letter, said on CNN, “You’re not just responsible for what you say. You are responsible for what people hear.”

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a liberal firebrand who loves tweaking Trump, tweeted that Trump “makes death threats because he’s a pathetic coward who can’t handle the fact that he’s losing to a girl.”

Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway fought back in a tweet of her own, calling Warren a “disgrace.”

GUN RIGHTS AN ISSUE

Gun rights have been a potent issue in a 2016 campaign being waged amid violence that has convulsed many American cities.

Trump has planted himself firmly on the side of gun owners with a “law and order” campaign. Before his remark about Clinton, he had said Islamic State militants who killed 130 people in France last year could have been stopped if some of the victims had been armed.

The Clinton campaign has challenged Trump when in the past he has accused her of planning to abolish the Second Amendment if elected president. A senior Clinton policy adviser said in May that she favors taking steps at the federal level to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while protecting the Second Amendment.

Tuesday’s speech came on the heels of a discordant week on the campaign trail for Trump, a businessman seeking his first public office. He came under fire from within his party for belatedly endorsing fellow Republicans in re-election races and a prolonged clash with the parents of fallen Muslim American Army captain Humayun Khan.

On Monday, Trump had seemed to be heeding Republican advice to stick to a message of criticizing Clinton and other Democrats while putting forward economic policy proposals in a speech in Detroit.

Trump’s vice presidential running mate Mike Pence, asked if he believed Trump was inciting violence toward Clinton, told NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate: “Of course not. No.”

But Democrats called Trump’s remarks another sign of a candidate unfit for the White House.

“Don’t treat this as a political misstep. It’s an assassination threat, seriously upping the possibility of a national tragedy & crisis,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, said in a tweet.

Immediately after Trump made his comment, many on social media accused him of effectively calling for Clinton’s assassination. In just three hours, 2nd amendment became the top trending topic on Twitter, with more than 60,000 posts mentioning the term.

Overall sentiment on the posts was more negative than positive, at a ratio of 2.5 to 1, according to the social media analytics firm Zoomph. #ProtectHillary was also one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter.

The 50 prominent national security officials said in their letter on Monday that Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history.”

“He appears to lack basic knowledge about and belief in the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws and U.S. institutions, including religious tolerance, freedom of the press, and an independent judiciary,” their statement said.

(Additional reporting and writing by Alana Wise in Washington and Angela Moon in New York; Editing by Howard Goller)

Trumpism Won’t Disappear When He Does

Trumpism Won’t Disappear When He Does

On Saturday, someone tried to kill Donald Trump.

You may not have heard about it. The story didn’t get much play, the attempt wasn’t well planned and the candidate was never in jeopardy.

Still the fact remains that authorities arrested one Michael Steven Sandford, 19, after he allegedly tried to grab a gun from the holster of a Las Vegas police officer with the idea of using it to kill Trump at a campaign rally. Authorities say Sandford, who carried a UK driver’s license but who had been living in New Jersey for about a year and a half, had visited a nearby gun range to learn how to handle a firearm. They say he has wanted to kill Trump for a year.

Let us be thankful he was not successful. The assassination of Donald Trump would have been a new low for a political season that is already the most dispiriting in memory. It would have deprived a family of its father and husband. It would have traumatized a nation where political murder has been a too-frequent tragedy.

And it would have imparted the moral authority of martyrdom to Trump’s ideas. That would be a disaster in its own right.

Like most would-be assassins, what Sandford apparently did not understand is that you cannot kill an idea with a bullet. Even bad ideas are impervious to gunfire.

Trump, of course, has been a veritable Vesuvius of bad ideas in the year since he took that escalator ride into the race for the presidency. From banning Muslim immigrants to building a wall on the southern border to punishing women who have abortions to advocating guns in nightclubs to judging judicial fitness based on heritage, to killing the wives and children of terror suspects, if there has been a hideous, unserious or flat-out stupid thought floated in this political season, odds are, it carried the Trump logo.

It is understandable, then, that even people who wish Trump no bodily harm might feel as Sandford presumably did: that if he were somehow just … gone, the stench of his ideas — of his anger, nativism, coarseness and proud ignorance — might somehow waft away like trash-fire smoke in a breeze.

But it doesn’t work that way. Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality did not die on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Nor did Adolf Hitler’s dream of racial extermination perish with him in that bunker beneath Berlin. Ideas, both transcendent and repugnant, are far harder than the fragile lives of the men and women who give them voice.

So, any hope that Trump’s disappearance would somehow fix America is naive. America’s problem has nothing to do with him, except to the degree he has made himself a focal point.

No, America’s problem is fear. Fear of economic stagnation, yes, and fear of terrorism. But those are proxies for the bigger and more fundamental fear: fear of demographic diminution, of losing the privileges and prerogatives that have always come with being straight, white, male and/or Christian in America. It was the holy quadfecta of entitlement, but that entitlement is under siege in a nation that grows more sexually, racially and religiously diverse with every sunrise.

Trumpism is only the loudest and most obvious response to that, and it will not disappear when he does. Indeed, there is no instant cure for what has America unsettled. There is only time and the hard work of change.

In a sense, we are bringing forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women really are created equal. If for some of us, that fires the imagination, it is hardly mysterious that for others, it kindles a sense of displacement and loss. The good news is that their Trumpism cannot survive in the new nation.

In the end, you see, only one thing can kill a bad idea.

And that’s a better one.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

The Homicide That Darkened American History

The Homicide That Darkened American History

WASHINGTON — Tuesday evening at Ford’s Theatre, a gala of haunting grandeur was guarded by a blinking police barricade. “It looks like a crime scene,” one city police officer observed. He had a point.

Across an arc of 150 years, memories of the homicide that darkened American history still run like a river to Tenth Street in northwest Washington, D.C. We know what took place in the crowded theater on April 14, 1865.

During a play, the president was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth, a vengeful actor who leapt to the stage to make the most infamous exit ever. Beloved, victorious Abraham Lincoln never regained consciousness. His long, strong body kept breathing until he died the next morning in a little house across the street. He was 56.

The dates rhymed in time. On April 14, 2015, I attended a Lincoln-lovers-unite tribute echoing the spring night President and Mrs. Lincoln rode over to see a London comedy. Outside on April 14, 1865, city streets buzzed with news of the Civil War’s end with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Giddiness and fireworks mixed with festering Confederate fury, such as Booth’s. Lincoln was the war’s final casualty.

Before the present-day show, Ford’s lobby was brimming with a bit of everybody. Lincoln would have loved it. I asked a bright-eyed lad how old he was. Hudson, 11, told me he lives in New York, and that his father was the program director. He was about Tad Lincoln’s age on the day his doting father died. Tad, the youngest son, turned 12 on April 4, 1865. While we chatted, I waved to my favorite Lincoln author, Harold Holzer of New York.

Seated in the full house, I looked at the draped presidential box and braced for the pistol shot in the dark at roughly 10:15 p.m. Near me in the plush red seats was a Republican congressman, Chris Stewart of Utah; the civil rights icon Julian Bond; Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post; and best-selling Lincoln author, James Swanson, who goes by Jamie. He captured the thrilling terror of the federal manhunt for Booth, who was captured — but not alive. Four co-conspirators were hanged.

The man of the moment was Paul Tetreault, director of Ford’s, who wore his signature bow tie and shook a thousand hands, as Lincoln did. He made everyone feel at home, with a sense of togetherness.

First came Colin Powell onstage, a living embodiment of Lincoln’s decision to let there be Union “colored” troops for the first time. The general’s welcome gave way to readings and musical selections, including the heartbreakingly beautiful soprano solo from Faust, sung by Alyson Cambridge.

In performance, pieces of Lincoln’s wry, self-deprecating humor flashed by like his blue-gray eyes – his best feature in a face he often mocked as ugly. Humor was more than an endearing trait. It was what he needed to survive the war, he said.

Who knew Judy Collins, shimmering in her 70s, was coming? Blowing a kiss to the Lincolns’ empty box, she sang “Amazing Grace,” the meaning not lost on anyone. The words were written by a truly wretched slave ship captain trying to save his soul — like the nation not so long ago. Her other old American song, “Beautiful Dreamer,” seemed to conjure the Civil War president, but the truth is, Lincoln was also a shrewd pragmatist.

A handful of black schoolgirls recited the Gettysburg Address. Songs from a new musical, Freedom’s Song, were sung by the Ford’s cast. “Father, How Long?” seemed to say it all. Freedom’s journey is a long time coming.

Leave it to Walt Whitman’s elegiac poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” its rousing lyrics by Julia Ward Howe, to bring down the house.

No sound from the box. A moment of silence — and tears — half broken-hearted, half uplifted — fell over the time and place. Out on Tenth Street, a vigil began. Yulanda Burgess, who made her period dress, came from Detroit. A senior citizen, Andres Torres-Diaz, traveled from Ohio.

Wednesday, proclaimed a day of remembrance by President Obama, was the April day that Lincoln died — at 7:22 a.m. Bells tolled across the city.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com. 

Lithograph of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. From left to right: Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris, Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth. Via Wikicommons.

White House Plays Down New Report Of Secret Service Woes

White House Plays Down New Report Of Secret Service Woes

Washington (AFP) — A White House official on Sunday played down a report that it took the Secret Service days to realize a man shot at the presidential residence in 2011, while President Barack Obama’s daughter was at home.

The Washington Post report came amid new scrutiny on the agency tasked with protecting the president, after a series of recent security lapses, including one earlier this month that saw an intruder armed with a knife jump over a security fence and burst into the White House.

While Obama and his wife were out of town the night of the November 11, 2011 shooting, their younger daughter Sasha was inside with her grandmother Marian Robinson, the Post revealed, while older daughter Malia was due to return any time from an evening with friends.

At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House, fired from a car parked some 700 yards (meters) away across the South Lawn, the report said.

And while Secret Service officers initially rushed to respond, they received a surprise order from a supervisor saying “no shots have been fired… Stand down,” the Post reported.

Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Tony Blinken did not refute the substance of the report, but said corrective measures were being taken.

“The Secret Service is investigating this, and they will take any steps necessary to correct any deficiency,” he told CNN.

“Let’s put this in perspective,” Blinken said.

“The men and women of the Secret Service put their lives on the line for the President of the United States, his family, and folks working in the White House every single day, 24 hours a day,” he stressed.

“Their task is incredible, and the burden that they bear is incredible.”

The Post report said the supervisor on duty believed the noise was a backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.

The newspaper said Obama and his wife were infuriated by the Secret Service response, and only learned of the incident days later.

The Secret Service later confirmed that bullets had indeed been fired at the White House, after a housekeeper noticed shattered glass and a chunk of cement on the floor from the gunfire.

The shots had been fired by Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, of Idaho, who was subsequently found guilty of attempting to assassinate the president and given a 25-year prison sentence.

Photo via Tom Lohdan via Flickr

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