Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety
Donald Trump threw around some strange ideas on public safety during a rally Sunday in Erie, Pennsylvania—but none more bizarre than seemingly hopping on board with the premise of the 2013 horror film The Purge.
Per the former president, the best way to keep America safe would be to allow criminals to get their fix on “one really violent day.”
“Now, if you had one really violent day—like a guy like, Mike Kelly, put him in charge, Congressman Kelly, put him in charge for one day—Mike would you say, you’re right here, he’s a great congressman, would you say, Mike, that if you were in charge, you would say, ‘Oh please don’t touch them, don’t touch them, let them rob your store,’” Trump said, imagining a scenario in which thieves loot a hypothetical storefront.
“All these stores go out of business, right? They don’t pay rent, the city doesn’t have—the whole—it’s a chain of events, it’s so bad. One rough hour, and I mean real rough—the word will get out and it will end immediately,” the Republican presidential nominee said to befuddled applause.
Trump on theft: If you had one really violent day.. .. … One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. pic.twitter.com/DkOdULcV32
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 29, 2024
It’s hard to imagine where Trump could have cooked up such a lawless, irrational idea—unless he had recently seen the dystopian horror flick, in which a family attempts to survive a state-sanctioned night during which all crime, including murder, is legalized.
Incredibly, the new position is just a drop in the bucket for Trump’s hair-raising ideas about how to combat crime in American cities. The former president has also advocated for expanding the death penalty to criminals convicted of minor crimes, such as drug dealing, and during his time in office revoked an Obama-era executive order that limited the distribution of military-grade weapons to local law enforcement.