[lg policy] Did Donald Trump just threaten the president? New Web of Language post.

[Baron, Dennis E]

There’s a new post on the Web of Language:

Did Donald Trump just threaten the president?

At a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, after warning the crowd that his rival, Hillary Clinton, planned to abolish the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, Republican candidate Donald Trump appeared to threaten<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/09/trump-appears-to-encourage-gun-owners-to-take-action-if-clinton-appoints-anti-gun-judges/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trump-guns-4pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory> Hillary Clinton’s life if she’s elected president:

By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do, folks, Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.

Trump’s rhetoric is frequently violent. He’s threatened protesters at rallies and encouraged chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Clinton. But since most people who drop the slightest hint of violence toward the president wind up in jail, this time the question in the air was, “Did Trump’s call for ‘Second Amendment solutions’ actually break the law?”

Always ready to jump into damage control mode, the Trump campaign insisted there was no threat: Trump wasn’t calling on gun owners to attack a president, he was talking about “the power of unification,” the fact that Second Amendment supporters are a large voting bloc who would make their views known at the ballot box.

That interpretation seemed a stretch, but whatever. Say, for the sake of argument, that Trump was actually suggesting assassination, would that violate the presidential threat law? According to the Supreme Court, that depends. . . .

Read the full post on the Web of Language:  http://bit.ly/2aKv5qM



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