Sarah Longwell: It Is Trump’s ‘Rhetoric that Has Been Creating This Environment for the Last Eight Years’

EXCERPT:

LONGWELL: “Because he‘s a bad person, because he‘s a small person, he lashes out at these marginalized communities as a way to make himself feel big and tough. And J.D. Vance has sort of wholesale imbibed this strategy from Donald Trump. And so what they did is they, out of whole cloth, out of, like, some baseless rumors from a person who apologized, by the way, the person who had posted this on Facebook, originally apologized, said it wasn‘t true, was sorry for the habit she was creating, but that doesn‘t matter to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. They are willing to continue to terrorize this community because they prefer a conversation that is in the, like, vein of immigration, that is somewhere approximating immigration, because they feel like that‘s safer territory for them. But they don‘t care who they hurt. And Donald Trump, as S.E. said, and it‘s absolutely true, he created this specter of political violence that we all now live under, and he lives under it too. And so it is his rhetoric that has been creating this environment for the last eight years, and J.D. Vance trying to chastise people is absurd."