What Trump Sells Is Impunity
Trump stands out in the GOP not for his racism, but his vision of emancipatory irresponsibility.
On January 10, 2025, a 23-year-old woman was shot to death by her father after a heated argument about Donald Trump. Lucy Harrison, a UK citizen and fashion buyer, was visiting her father in Texas when they began arguing about the soon-to-be inaugurated Trump. According to testimony from her boyfriend delivered at a coroner’s inquest in the UK, Harrison had asked her father, “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?” The man then replied that he “had two other daughters who lived with him so it would not upset him that much.”
This crime is but one of the many crowdsourced little terrors that seem to define our era. It calls to mind the murder of Renée Good and the obvious, almost gleeful rationalizations for killing her. Consider Fox’s Jesse Watters whinging about Good’s poetry, how she had a “lesbian partner,” and her “pronouns in bio,” as if any of this implicitly justified an extrajudicial killing. Yet they revel in it.
So, is that all that is needed to explain Trump’s appeal? A licence to be cruel? The permission he provides the public on matters of bigotry is a huge part of the equation—and the mainstream press’ unwillingness to grapple with the intensity of MAGA racism is an enduring institutional failure on a par with media coverage in the lead up to the Iraq War. …
Continue reading this article by Katherine Alejandra Cross, “What Trump Sells Is Impunity,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/what-trump-sells-is-impunity/