The dangers of Trump’s violent rhetoric in America’s not-so-distant past

BY LUCY JEWEL AND MARY CAMPBELL, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 03/26/18 03:46 PM EDT  108 THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Trump was in full form at his rally in Pittsburgh earlier this month. Playing to an audience of thousands in an airplane hangar, Trump delighted his supporters with his incendiary language. “I’d love to beat Oprah . . . That would be a painful experience for her,” he declared, relishing the prospect of trouncing Winfrey in a 2020 presidential contest.

“The only thing these gang members understand is toughness,” he proclaimed, turning to his recent refrain of capital punishment for drug dealers. Revisiting some of his favorite epithets, Trump maintained his brutish tone, referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas” before castigating NBC’s Chuck Todd as a “sleepy-eyed son of a....” and dismissing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as “a low-IQ individual.”

Such rough talk comes as no surprise, of course. As the New York Times’ running list of the “People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter” so neatly reveals, mocking invectives are almost a reflex for the forty-fifth president.

What Trump’s Pittsburgh harangue drives home, however, is the extent to which his taunts and jeers so frequently focus on the bodies of women and minorities. Indeed, the president’s boasts about his ability to wound Oprah and have gang members “grabbed by the neck and . . . [thrown] in the paddy” echo earlier comments in which he sniggered about “blood coming out of [Megyn Kelly’s] eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”; trumpeted his freedom to “do anything” to women, including “grab ‘em by the...”; and gleefully imagined NFL owners jerking “son of a bitch” football players off the field for taking a protest knee during the national anthem.

According to Trump, such verbal violence makes for great entertainment. “[Y]ou’d all be out of here right now. You’d be so bored,” he told his Pittsburgh audience, scorning the apparent tedium of traditional presidential civility. “Is there anything more fun than a Trump rally?” he crowed.

It’s worth remembering that such violent theatrical fun has a long history in American culture and, specifically, law. The Massachusetts Bay Colonists certainly wouldn’t have approved of Trump’s language. (Blasphemy and adultery were both punishable by death in the New England colonies).

That said, John Cotton and his followers might well have recognized something of themselves in our current president’s sustained attention to bodies in pain. If, as Sarah Vowell writes, “threatening to take away a Puritan magistrate’s right to punish [was] like yanking the trumpet out of Louis Armstrong’s hands,” the most expressive Massachusetts Bay punishments were often corporal. Reading through the colonies’ laws, one finds references to whippings, facial branding, and the summary piercing of a wrongdoer's tongue.

Although the New England colonial codes authorized such punishments for both sexes, the Southern colonies typically visited the most tortuous bodily mortifications on their most vulnerable inhabitants — women and slaves.

Although South Carolina offenders could be fined for their transgressions, for example, women typically had no independent financial resources. As such, they relied on the men in their lives to settle their debts with the courts. If these men refused, female wrongdoers paid their penalties in the currency of physical suffering, submitting themselves to the lash or the ducking stool.

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http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/380324-the-dangers-of-trumps-violent-rhetoric-in-americas-not-so-distant-past