NYT’s Mark Landler: Trump Rallies Becoming ‘Ritual,’ Normalizing Authoritarian Language and Violence

RUSH EXCERPT:

LANDLER: "Well, as you say, it plays wonderfully with his base, and it’s been a hit for him throughout the campaign and continues to be one of the most popular things when you go to a trump rally, it always has a feel of ritual now and there are certain things people who go to rally expects and one is the opportunity to start chanting CNN sucks and to turn around and you know, villify the people standing in the media pen. That’s why he does it. I think that the problem that we’re running into is that his repeated phrase enemy of the people and he did it this morning when he suggested people of media cause wars to happen is that that phrase is particularly loaded. The phrase fake news, which he also uses is corrosive to the credibility of the media over time, it’s unfair, he shouldn’t use it. But the phrase enemy of the people I think is a whole different order of magnitude. It has a long historic Providence, it goes back to the French revolution, it goes back to Stalin, lend non, those in those total tearian society use the phrase to suggest that one group of so it’s was sub human and by doing so it opened the door to all kinds of violence being carried out against them. I’m not saying that president Trump understands the historical Providence this phrase, but people who are seeing it out in the world certainly do. So by using it over and over again, the way he does, I think he opens the door to the possibility of bad things happening. Now, we’ve been really lucky, we’ve been through many, many rallies during the campaign and since he’s been president, and there really hasn’t been a spill over to outright violence, it’s been more in the realm of reporters, and it’s scary, but you know, I don’t think any of us have really had any anyone take a swing at us. But the fear I have is if by continuing to do this by normalizing this language, making it part of the vocabulary of the country, he ask open the door to have some violence happen down the road and I think that’s extraordinarily dangerous."

(via RealClearPolitics)