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Re: F6 post# 247122

Tuesday, 03/29/2016 9:03:51 PM

Tuesday, March 29, 2016 9:03:51 PM

Violence Erupts at Trump Rallies: A Closer Look

Published on Mar 14, 2016 by Late Night with Seth Meyers [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVTyTA7-g9nopHeHbeuvpRA / http://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth , http://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth/videos ]

Seth takes a closer look at recent violent clashes at Donald Trump's rallies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FiefoU3Upo [with comments]

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Seth Meyers Destroys Donald Trump @ White House Correspondents Dinner 5/1/2011

Uploaded on May 3, 2011 by Gayfurry77777 [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1hTcEBK8lKrOGl-0igq9nA / http://www.youtube.com/user/Gayfurry77777 , http://www.youtube.com/user/Gayfurry77777/videos ]

Seth Meyers Destroys Donald Trump: 7 Best Jokes
Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers hosted the star-studded White House Correspondents' Association Dinner Saturday night, and he wasted no time in roasting Donald Trump and other controversial media figures.
The "SNL" head writer also takes digs at the royal wedding, Katie Couric and the Republican presidential candidates during the White House Correspondents Dinner....
Below, his best moments:
1. On Trump's presidential candidacy: "Donald Trump said that he was running for president as a Republican. That's funny, because I thought he was running as a joke."
2. On Trump's hair: "Donald Trump often appears on Fox, which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump's head. If you're at the Washington Post table with Trump and you can't finish your entree, don't worry, the fox will eat it."
3. On Trump's accent: "I like that Trump is filthy rich but nobody told his accent. His whole life is models and gold leaf and marble columns but he still sounds like a know-it-all down at the O.T.B."
4. On Sarah Palin: "Donald Trump owns the Miss USA pageant, which is great for Republicans because it will streamline their search for vice president."
5. On the royal wedding: "As I was watching the festivities I couldn't help thinking how wonderful it is to live in a country where people don't have to wear hats like that."
6. On the Republican presidential candidates: "Just look at the options Republicans are kicking around: Palin. Huckabee. Gingrich. Trump. That doesn't sound like a field of candidates -- that sounds like season 13 of Dancing With The Stars. And not the stars -- the dancers."
7. On departed CBS news anchor Katie Couric: "Katie [Couric] was known best for asking those tough questions, like 'name a newspaper.'
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/seth-meyers-destroys-donald-trump-183885

Donald Trump Slammed by Stuttering Foundation After Seth Meyers Attack
"Shame on you, Mr. Trump!" the group's president says after Trump calls the host of the White House Correspondents Association dinner a "stutterer."
Add the Stuttering Foundation to the list of those upset with Donald Trump.
The organization on Monday issued a statement slamming Trump's use of the word "stutterer" as an insult aimed at Seth Meyers, host of Saturday's White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
"Shame on you, Mr. Trump!" said Jane Fraser, president of the Memphis, Tenn.-based group. "We at the Stuttering Foundation find it discouraging that in 2011, Donald Trump has chosen to use the word 'stutterer' in a derogatory fashion, something to be made fun of, to describe Seth Meyers' speech at the annual White House Correspondents' dinner."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-slammed-by-stuttering-184153

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Km4R377s4M [with (over 5,000) comments]

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Trump Dominates Super Tuesday: A Closer Look

Published on Mar 2, 2016 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth takes a closer look at what Donald Trump's Super Tuesday victories mean for the Republican party.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeYj1rx5Fz0 [with comments]

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Trump, Rubio, Christie and the KKK: A Closer Look

Published on Mar 1, 2016 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth takes a closer look at Donald Trump, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio's traded insults and the Ku Klux

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5q1cxIU01M [with comments]

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Donald Trump's White Nationalist Supporters: A Closer Look - Late Night with Seth Meyers

Published on Jan 12, 2016 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth takes a closer look at the white nationals in Trump's corner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTB-iuez-Mg [with comments]

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Trump's Plan to Ban Muslims: A Closer Look - Late Night with Seth Meyers

Published on Dec 8, 2015 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth takes a closer look at Donald Trump's proposal to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbBb_czZgvM [with comments]

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Donald Trump's False Claims: A Closer Look - Late Night with Seth Meyers

Published on Nov 24, 2015 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth on Trump's claim that he saw New Jersey Muslims cheering on 9/11 and more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d70OuefjY70 [with comments]

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Donald Trump Is Running for President - Late Night with Seth Meyers

Published on Jun 16, 2015 by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Seth unpacks Donald Trump's presidential announcement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nZnfqFEwx8 [with comments]

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Donald Trump Warns There Could Be Riots If He Isn’t GOP Nominee

“I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
03/16/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-riots-nomination_us_56e956fae4b0b25c9183e915 [with embedded video, and comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzzP7SxMFlk [the source of the embedded video; with comments]

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Dear GOP: Donald Trump is not ‘malleable’

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally on March 11 in St. Louis.
(Seth Perlman/Associated Press)

By Danielle Allen
March 18, 2016

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

Republican elected officials, take note. Donald Trump is not malleable.

How do we know this? There is the fact, of course, that people have been pressing him since the fall to name his foreign policy advisers and on Wednesday he admitted that he consults primarily with himself [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-220853 ]. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” he said. “My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”

But even more important, we know that he is not malleable and will not take advice because we’ve seen a specific case of it acted out in relation to the most important issue put on the table by Trump in this campaign: civil order.

As is now broadly recognized, Trump has routinely encouraged and condoned violence at his rallies. He has said a protester maybe “should have been roughed up [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/22/black-activist-punched-at-donald-trump-rally-in-birmingham/ ].” He has encouraged [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/10/the-cnn-miami-republican-debate-transcript-annotated/ ] his followers to “knock the crap out of” protesters and promised (perhaps emptily in the end) to pay their legal bills if they did. He has waxed nostalgic [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/23/donald-trump-on-protester-id-like-to-punch-him-in-the-face/ ] for the good old days when protesters got carried out on stretchers.

The media, myself included [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-thirst-for-arbitrary-power/2016/03/07/505129bc-e3a3-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html ], has been criticizing him on this point for a solid month, at least. Voices from all over the political spectrum have weighed in on the view that the leaders of a democratic republic should never, not even on the campaign trail, call for or condone unlawful violence. To the contrary, it is their job especially, as the Wall Street Journal argued [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-protesters-1457909062 ] in an editorial last week, to maintain civil order and to establish a norm and culture of respect for civil order.

So Trump doesn’t listen to the media. No news there. But more important, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), a leader, in other words, of the Republican Party, spoke with Trump by phone on Tuesday and encouraged him, as the Daily Caller reported [ http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/15/mitch-mcconnell-speaks-with-donald-trump-about-violence-at-rallies/ ], to “?‘condemn’ the ‘violent expressions’ at some of his political rallies.” McConnell said: “I took the opportunity to recommend to him that no matter who may be triggering these violent expressions or conflicts that we’ve seen in some of these rallies, it might be good to condemn that and discourage it no matter what the source of it is.”

McConnell should have used stronger language. It’s not that it “might” be good for Trump to do this. It would definitely be good for him to do this. Nonetheless, it counts as McConnell’s having given Trump good advice.

What did Trump do with it? He ignored it.

First thing, Wednesday morning, he warned [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/16/politics/donald-trump-ted-cruz-brokered-convention/ ] that if he continues to lead in the delegate count but falls short of the 1,237 needed for a majority, and the convention doesn’t yield him as the nominee, the Republican Party should expect riots. “I think it would be — I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.”

Trump went on to say [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/273196-trump-predicts-riots-if-hes-not-nominee ], “I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.” In other words, he wants to wave his hands and claim that he’s just describing a potential outcome, not himself doing anything to generate that outcome. But as Marco Rubio advised him recently, words have consequences [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcO3FwAr1XA (next below; no comments yet)],

especially when they come from a presidential candidate, and especially from one whose supporters have a notably strong devotion to him.

In other words, Trump just projected violent activity from his “many, many millions” of followers. He conjured up a possibility for all of our imaginations, thereby nudging it toward reality, rather than using his words to nudge us toward civil order. He might instead have said, “My supporters will be disappointed but if the rules of the game lead us to a different nominee, we will accept that.” That is the requisite statement from a political leader in a democratic republic. It both acknowledges strong feelings and aims to channel them in the right direction.

On the issue, then, of violence at his rallies and the potential violence of his supporters, the media, commentators across the partisan spectrum, Rubio and McConnell have all given Trump advice.

And he has taken it from none of us.

Woe betide you, Republicans, if you think you can mold this man. Trump is right. He listens only to himself.

Read more:

Michael Gerson: Republicans stain themselves by sticking with Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-stain-themselves-and-their-party-by-sticking-with-trump/2016/03/16/ac7b4d2c-ebae-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html

The Post’s View: To defend our democracy against Trump, the GOP must aim for a brokered convention
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/to-defend-our-democracy-against-trump-the-gop-must-aim-for-a-brokered-convention/2016/03/16/074399d4-eb9c-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html

Dana Milbank: Rubio’s parting shot at Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marco-rubios-honorable-end/2016/03/15/c52aa04c-eaec-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html

Michael Gerson: Trump is the demagogue that our Founding Fathers feared
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-the-demagogue-that-our-founding-fathers-feared/2016/03/10/58584278-e6df-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html

© 2016 The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gop-donald-trump-is-not-yours-to-mold/2016/03/17/cc7be5a2-ec56-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html [with comments]

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Donald Trump Says He’ll Tell Supporters Not To Riot, ‘But’ ...

Donald Trump can’t stop flirting with political violence.
AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

They’re gonna be sooo mad.

By Arthur Delaney
03/20/2016 11:49 am ET

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will tell his supporters not to riot if he’s denied the Republican presidential nomination, but he suggested it could happen anyway.

ABC News host George Stephanopoulos had to ask three times to get Trump to say he’d tell his supporters not to riot if he’s denied the nomination at the Republican National Convention this summer.

“I would certainly tell them that, but, you know, look, these people are — are fervent,” Trump said.

“I don’t want to see riots. I don’t want to see problems,” Trump continued. “But, you know, you have — you have millions of people who we’re talking about, George, millions of additional people have gone. You know, I’ve gotten more than 2 million votes more than anybody else, 2 million votes, more than anybody else.”

Trump first said there could be riots [ http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/16/donald-trump-warns-of-riots-if-party-blocks-him-at-convention/ ] if someone else gets the nomination last week. “I think you’d have riots,” he said. “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.”

Other Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.), condemned Trump’s riot comment, coming as it did on the heels of violent clashes between Trump supporters and protesters at his rallies. “Nobody should say such things in my opinion because to even address or hint at violence [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/17/politics/paul-ryan-gop-open-convention-donald-trump/index.html ] is unacceptable,” Ryan said.

The criticism hasn’t stopped Trump from hinting at violence.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Trump said Sunday. “But I will say this, you’re going to have a lot of very unhappy people.”

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-violence_us_56e1f16fe4b0b25c91815913 ] and is a serial liar [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-911_565b1950e4b08e945feb7326 ], rampant xenophobe [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9-outrageous-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-latinos_55e483a1e4b0c818f618904b ], racist [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_us_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83 ], misogynist [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/18-real-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women_us_55d356a8e4b07addcb442023 ] and birther [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-stephen-colbert-birther_56022a33e4b00310edf92f7a ] who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-riot_us_56eeb303e4b09bf44a9d83ed [with comments]

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“I Wouldn’t Lead It”: Understanding Trump’s Incitement to Violence

ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Stanley Fish
Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law at Florida International University; Floershimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School
03/20/2016 11:01 pm ET | Updated Mar 20, 2016

In the March 20th edition of the Wall Street Journal, political commentator Peggy Noonan reflects [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-gop-break-apart-or-evolve-1458257138 ] on Donald Trump’s saying that if he were denied the nomination by some nit-picking rule (like the rule that you must win a majority of the delegates before you can claim victory), “I think you’d have riots” and “bad things would happen.” Of course, he added, “I wouldn’t lead it.”

Noonan wonders if he knows what he’s saying, if he knows that his statement comes across as a threat: “Nice little convention you have here, shame if someone put a match to it.” Doesn’t Trump understand, she asks, that “American politics is always potentially a powder keg?”

Of course he does. In an earlier post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-fish/trumps-good-bad-speaking-_b_8064902.html ] I analyzed Trump’s rambling, episodic, anecdotal and sequentially incoherent speaking style as a twenty-first century instantiation of the mode of self-presentation celebrated long ago by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who boasted that he wrote without premeditation and just let one thought (and word) follow another in whatever order occurred to him. The idea was to achieve a spontaneity that says to the reader or listener: “here I am warts and all, a real person telling you what I think, not one of those confected public figures who hides behind a curtain of commonplace pieties; at least with me you know what you’re getting.”

Trump enacts the Montaigne-esque model perfectly, and in these latest statements he follows (probably accidentally) two other models — one philosophical, the other literary. The philosophical model is provided by John Searle’s analysis of what he calls “indirect speech acts.” An indirect speech act is one that conveys more than its literal meaning. “Did you call my mother today?” is, on one level, a simple question and a request for information. But one can easily imagine the domestic situation in which the question is heard (indirectly) as a reminder of an obligation and as a potential rebuke. “You said you’d call my mother today and if you didn’t I’ll be really pissed off.” Another example: you ask, “Do you really want to eat the sixth piece of pizza?,” but you mean — and are heard as meaning — “You shouldn’t eat that sixth piece of pizza; it will be bad for you.”

So when Trump says, “I think you’d have riots,” he can claim (and does claim) that he is merely making a prediction, but his target audiences — his detractors and his supporters — will hear the prediction as a threat and an invitation respectively. To the one group he is saying, “This is what will happen to you if you gang up against me; the party will be ruined.” To the other group he is saying, “If they do this to me, you know what to do in response.” The fact that he specifically disclaims these message by declaring “I wouldn’t lead it” only calls attention to them. It is the “clean hands” gesture performed by someone whose hands are getting dirtier by the minute.

The literary model for this performance is provided by Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Co-conspirators Cassius and Brutus have unwisely allowed Antony to address the Roman citizenry on the condition that he not stir the people up. Antony follows his instructions to the letter, declaring that he has come only to bury Caesar, not to praise him in terms that would provoke outrage against those who have killed him. He says that he has no wish to refute the arguments presented by Brutus moments earlier — “I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke.” He says again and again that the killers are “honorable men,” but with each repetition the compliment — surrounded as it is by a rehearsal of Caesar’s acts of generosity toward the people — rings more hollow. He characterizes himself as without eloquence and imagines what he would be able to say were he as eloquent as Brutus. “Were I Brutus” then I might speak in such a way as to “move/ The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.” But I’m not Brutus and I’m not counseling mutiny (that is, riots). And no sooner has he uttered this disclaimer than the citizens cry in unison, “We’ll mutiny,” and go off to find, and kill, the conspirators: “Let not a traitor live.” Watching the result of his words, Antony crows, “Mischief thou art afoot.” It is a mischief he has caused in the very act of denying any wish to do so.

That too is Trump’s art and it has already had the predictable (and desired) effects. His detractors are afraid, and his supporters are already beating people up and looking forward, no doubt, to a glorious near-future when they can punch more people in the face in obedience to the glorious leader who has given them their marching orders while pretending to be doing nothing of the kind. It’s a great rhetorical move, one that he has perfected, and it’s likely we will see it again.

Related:

Why Trump?
03/03/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-trump_1_b_9372450.html [with comments]

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-fish/i-wouldnt-lead-it-underst_b_9513330.html [with comments]

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The Donald: A Gathering Storm

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

By Bevis Longstreth
03/20/2016 07:04 pm ET | Updated Mar 20, 2016

On the pedestals of two sculptures fronting the National Archives, plainly visible while driving down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, are the words “What is Past is Prologue. Study the Past.”

In presidential aspirant Donald Trump, there are whiffs of the powerful Lousiana demagogue Huey Long, who called himself the “Kingfish.” His shrewd, unscrupulous, political touch, his flamboyance, braggadocian talents and persona, overall they remind one, irresistibly, of Donald Trump. Huey Long’s autobiography, Every Man A King [ http://www.amazon.com/Every-Man-King-Autobiography-Huey/dp/0306806959 ], came out in 1933, bound in a resplendent gold jacket bearing five pictures of the Senator. He ordered 50,000 copies and sold 20,000 for a dollar each. And then ordered the remainder given away. Trump’s books have a similar ring.

Long’s powers of persuasion were immense. In Arkansas, he lifted up Hattie Caraway, wife of a Senator who died, enabling her to serve out his unexpired term. She wanted to run for re-election, but would have to line up against seven or eight experienced male politicians. She was taunted and laughed at by most politicians — all save the Kingfish, who campaigned for her throughout the state and gave her a victory shocking to all but him.

One of FDR’s most vociferous critics, the Kingfish wanted the presidency and, after playing an important role in getting FDR the nomination in 1932, was gathering strength sufficient to perhaps defeat FDR in 1936 or possibly cause his defeat to another by running on a third-party ticket. As Governor of Louisiana, he became a dictator, exercising absolute power against the big corporations and in favor of the masses. Had Long not been gunned down in Baton Rouge in 1935, who knows how the era of FDR would have changed? Studying Long’s rise to power is highly instructive in trying to comprehend the gathering storm that is Donald Trump.

There are also whiffs of Hitler in Trump’s increasingly plausible march to the White House by perfectly democratic processes, as were exercised by Hitler in the Weimar Republic, becoming Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, one month before FDR took the oath. Both men came to power in times of massive adversity. Elites in each country worried that voters, desperate for strong leadership, could accept a dictator. In fact, either FDR or Hitler probably could have seized dictatorial powers. Only one did, but the history of events in both countries deserve careful study, given the large and growing populist reaction so favorable to Trump and devastating to the Republican establishment.

A book worth revisiting in light of the Trump phenomenon is Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here [complete at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html , http://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Signet-Classics/dp/0451465644 ], published in October, 1935. It demonstrates the fragility of our nation’s democracy by having a folksy New Englander, Buzz Windrip, gain the White House with vague blandishments, and then usher in a dictatorial regime of suppression, terror and totalitarianism to save the nation from welfare cheats, promiscuity, crime and a liberal press. The threat of fascism in America captured his readers’ attention, making this deeply troubling story an overnight national bestseller. Lewis was married to Dorothy Thompson, the Herald Tribune correspondent reporting from Berlin on the rise of Hitler. His novel was inspired by her observations of what a demagogue can do to a democracy. The New Yorker declared it “not only [Lewis’s] most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in this country.”

Hallie Flanagan was a student at Grinnell College with Harry Hopkins, the head of the Works Progress Administration. He picked her to head the WPA’s Federal Theater Project. She proved a brilliant choice. One of her boldest ideas was to try to persuade Lewis to dramatize his book. She sent her top managers to Vermont to ask him. Lewis wanted more fame than might come from a single opening on Broadway. He turned her down. Undeterred, Hallie promised to open in 21 cities in seventeen states, all on the same night — October 27, 1936. That will do, he said, and came to New York City to start writing. By mistake, that opening date was given to the press only eight weeks in advance of Lewis’s agreement, before a single word had been written. Remarkably, the goal was achieved. Across the land, the play enjoyed a long run.

Brooks Atkinson, writing for the New York Times, summed up audience reaction:

Mr. Lewis has a story to tell that is calculated to make the blood of a liberal run cold ... It Can’t Happen Here ought to scare the daylights out of the heedless American who believes as this column does that it can’t happen here ...

In their day, the play and the book carried an important message to every thinking American. Those thinking today should heed it anew.

Related:

Trump: Can It Happen Here?
03/21/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/trump-can-it-happen-here_b_9514652.html [with comments]

Can Fascism Triumph in America?
03/14/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/can-fascism-triumph-in-am_b_9456408.html [with comments]

It Can’t Happen Here... Can It?
Trump’s Storm Troopers and the Possibility of American Fascism
March 13, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176114/ [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-dreyfuss/it-cant-happen-here-can-it_b_9457848.html (with comments); the introduction, included with the original, separately also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-engelhardt/which-authoritarian-was-t_b_9457940.html (with comment)]

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bevis-longstreth/the-donald-a-gathering-st_b_9513024.html [with comments]

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The Man the Founders Feared

Daniel Zender

By Peter Wehner
MARCH 19, 2016

“I THINK you’d have riots.” So said Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/16/donald-trump-warns-of-riots-if-party-blocks-him-at-convention/ ] last week, when he was asked by CNN what he thought would happen if he arrived at the Republican Convention this summer a few delegates short of the 1,237 needed to win outright and didn’t set forth from Cleveland as the party’s nominee.

It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.

Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada [ http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/23/donald-trump-on-protester-id-like-to-punch-him-in-the-face/ ]. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)

Of another protester [ http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/22/politics/donald-trump-black-lives-matter-protester-confrontation/ ], Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” In St. Louis, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful: “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” About protesters in general, he said: “There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.”

Talk like this eventually finds its way into action. And so on March 10, a Trump supporter named John McGraw, was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct, after a protester was sucker-punched [ http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/10/donald-trump-rally-protester/ ] as he was being hauled by security guards out of a Trump rally in North Carolina the day before. When interviewed afterward Mr. McGraw said, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”

And Donald Trump’s reaction? He said he was considering paying Mr. McGraw’s legal fees. “He obviously loves his country,” Mr. Trump added, “and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.”

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.

Mr. Trump’s comments, startling in a leading presidential candidate, have raised widespread concern about the path we find ourselves on. But concern about political violence, mob rule and unchecked passion is hardly new in American history.

In 1838, as a 28-year-old state legislator, Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill. The speech was given in the aftermath of the lynching of a mixed-race boatman and the burning of a black abolitionist newspaper editor. Lincoln warned that a “mobocratic spirit” and “wild and furious passions” posed a threat to republican institutions. He also alerted people to the danger of individuals — “an Alexander, a Caesar or a Napoleon?” — who, in their search for glory and power, might pose a threat to American self-government.

“Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us?” Lincoln asked.

The antidote to this threat, Lincoln argued, was to cultivate a “political religion” that emphasized “reverence for the laws.” Passion was our enemy, he warned; it had to be contained. “Reason — cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason — must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”

Lincoln was a keen student and great interpreter of the founders, and of course the founders also thought deeply about how a self-governing people could restrain political passions. In his book “Madison’s Metronome,” the scholar Greg Weiner points out that James Madison’s lifelong concern was that majorities would be governed by emotion rather than reason, the “cool” faculty. In Mr. Weiner’s words, Madison “portrayed passion through metaphors that suggested rapid and uncontrolled spread, including those of fires, fevers, pestilence and contagions.”

Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison undertook an extraordinarily thorough study of various forms of government. How might the Constitution protect us from what Aristotle called “the insolence of demagogues”?

Among the defects of ancient and modern republics, Madison wrote, were “popular assemblages, so quickly formed, so susceptible of contagious passions, so exposed to the misguidance of eloquent and ambitious leaders, and so apt to be tempted by the facility of forming interested majorities, into measures unjust and oppressive to the minor parties.”

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. No one would mistake Mr. Trump for eloquent, but he is a highly effective communicator in a political culture that is now almost indistinguishable from the reality TV culture from which he emerged. But the Trump phenomenon isn’t just about coarsening and stupidity: His political practices are precisely what the founders feared and Lincoln warned against.

When he was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about the sucker-punching episode, Mr. Trump responded by saying, “People come with tremendous passion and love for this country, and when they see protest — in some cases — you know, you’re mentioning one case, which I haven’t seen, I heard about it, which I don’t like. But when they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that’s unbelievable. They have anger. They love this country.” In many respects, he added, “it’s a beautiful thing.”

This is an increasingly familiar refrain. When two brothers beat up a homeless Latino man last summer and cited Mr. Trump’s words as their justification — “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told the police — Mr. Trump responded by saying that while this was a shame, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate.” His supporters, he said, “love this country and they want this country to be great again — they are passionate.”

Note Mr. Trump’s linkage of violence, passion, anger and love of country. After the sucker-punch, Mr. Trump, while himself protesting that he doesn’t condone violence, initially indicated that he might subsidize it. He said that he hoped that he hadn’t done anything to create a tone where violence was encouraged, even though he does just that. Last week, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was accused of manhandling a reporter and then sought to discredit her on Twitter and elsewhere. Mr. Trump went out of his way to praise Mr. Lewandowski during his victory speech in Florida.

For Mr. Trump, this is all of a piece. His entire campaign, from its very first moments, has been built on stoking anger, grievances and resentment against people of other races, religions and nationalities. Mexicans coming to America are rapists and drug dealers. Muslims hate America and need to be barred from it. Syrian refugees are “Trojan horses.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s politics of hate is now metastasizing into violence. He incites people — not all people to be sure, but enough. On social media in particular, one sees how he gives his supporters permission to express dark and ugly sentiments that existed before but were generally kept hidden from view.

Max Boot, a Republican Trump critic who was a foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio’s campaign, says that he has never experienced as much anti-Semitism as he has since the start of the Trump campaign. There are no filters anymore, no restraints, no cultural guardrails. Now, under the sway of Trumpism, what was once considered shameful asserts itself openly. As we contemplate this, it is worth recalling that the membrane separating what the Scottish novelist John Buchan called “the graces of civilization” from ”the rawness of barbarism” is thinner and more fragile than we sometimes imagine.

The reasons for the rise of Mr. Trump are undoubtedly complicated and will be studied for decades to come. That Mr. Trump’s rise has occurred in the Republican Party is painful for those of us who are Republicans. That more and more Republicans are making their own accommodation with or offering outright support for Mr. Trump — governors like Chris Christie and Rick Scott, the former candidate Ben Carson and the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich — makes things even worse. Because we can no longer deny what Mr. Trump is and what he represents. The prospect of turning the party apparatus over to such a person is sickening.

The founders, knowing history and human nature, took great care to devise a system that would prevent demagogues and those with authoritarian tendencies from rising up in America. That system has been extraordinarily successful. We have never before faced the prospect of a political strongman becoming president.

Until now.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

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