There are many reasons to fear a potential second term in office for Donald Trump. His reported plan to replace government experts with political loyalists, for one. His weird obsession with toilets, for another. The fact that his reaction to losing the last election was to incite a violent attack on the US Capitol that left five people dead, obviously. Also very much at the top of the list? His stated plan to exact revenge on all of his perceived enemies—and rid the country of people he just doesn’t like.
Yes—following news of Trump’s alleged vow to “immediately” fire anyone who investigated him should he be reelected—the ex-president spent a large chunk of a speech in Michigan on Sunday listing the “villains” he would use his power as POTUS to eliminate. “This is the final battle,” Trump told the audience at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will defeat crooked Joe Biden. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
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Not surprisingly, he also claimed that the many criminal investigations into his actions—two of which have thus far resulted in multicount indictments—are only happening because he’s doing well in the polls and not because he committed a cornucopia of (alleged) crimes, some of which he could do many years in prison for if convicted.
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Naturally, Trump also used the speech to trot out a number of his favorite lies, like that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he’s a big tough guy when it comes to China (fact-check: not so much), and vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war. (He’s previously said he has the ability to do this “immediately”—but for reasons that remain unclear, cannot tell anyone else how until he’s president again.) And in a bit of catnip to the base, he promised to cut funding to schools that teach critical race theory and “transgenderism.”
But of course, it wouldn’t be a Trump speech without at least one truly WTF moment, like when the ex-president—a man who regularly gives Satan himself a run for his money—declared that Biden, a devout Catholic, is “not in favor of religion,” because apparently if you don’t impose your religious views on other people you’re anti-religion.
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…and whatever this nightmare fuel was:
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