Donald Trump's Call for 'Really Violent Day' Compared to 'The Purge' - Newsweek

"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for "one really violent day" to crack down on shoplifting, drawing comparisons to The Purge and to Kristallnacht in 1930s Germany.

The Purge is a film franchise in which one day every year all crimes are legal. Kristallnacht was a series of Nazi-orchestrated mob attacks against Jewish people and businesses in 1938.

Speaking at a Sunday rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, former President Trump said that police needed one violent day to restore order.

"What the hell is going on?" he said. "See, we have to let the police do their job [crowd cheers]. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough [crowd cheers louder]. And you know, the funny thing with all of that stuff, look at the department stores, same thing, they walk into it. You see these guys walking out with air conditioners, with refrigerators on their back. The craziest thing. And the police aren't allowed to do their job. They're told if you do anything, you're gonna lose your pension, you're gonna lose your family, your house, your car.

"You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day," he said, during a section of the speech about how left-wing politicians are allegedly preventing police from enforcing the law, "one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."

Trump's campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek that Trump's remarks reinforced his position as a law-and-order candidate.

"President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws," Cheung said. "Otherwise, it's all-out anarchy, which is what Kamala Harris has created in some of these communities across America, especially during her time as CA Attorney General when she emboldened criminals."

Critics on social media were quick to compare Trump's suggestion to The Purge, a fictional event from a dystopian film franchise where all crimes, including murder, are legal for 12 hours.

Harris-supporting user @ArmandDoma, co-founder of YIMBYs for Harris, an affordable housing-focused Kamala Harris fundraising group, posted on X: "Trump is literally proposing The Purge lmao."

Another user @krassenstein, a prominent pro-Harris and Trump-critical influencer, wrote: "Did Trump just f—king suggest 'The Purge'? Trump implies that his idea for stopping crime is to allow for 'one really violent day... I mean real rough..."

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said undecided voters would not be persuaded to vote for Donald Trump, because while many of them may think Harris is soft on crime, they often dislike Trump's rhetorical style.

"This is critical, voters, these undecided voters don't like how Donald Trump talks but they do agree with him on many of the most important issues," Luntz said on CNN Sunday. "They approve of Harris' approach of focusing on the future, but they question her on issues like this, whether she's strong enough and tough enough."

"So the rhetoric is not effective, but focusing on the issue is, and that's why they're still undecided voters. Because, quite frankly, they don't want to vote for either candidate. What I tell people in speeches is the good news, we're gonna be done with all of this and in less than 40 days, the bad news is that one of these candidates has to win. This is the frustration for undecided voters. They like the policies of one candidate and they prefer the persona of the other candidate."

Another user, @jimstewartson, a frequent critic of Trump and the MAGA movement, went further, and drew a comparison to Kristallnacht, due to the violence Trump suggests being state-sponsored, rather than citizen-on-citizen violence like in The Purge, writing on X:

"In PA today, Donald Trump gave one of the most dangerous speeches of the 21st century by describing his strategy for reducing crime as Kristallnacht. I've seen this described as 'The Purge' which is wrong. That was a movie where the population was set against itself. This is the description of state-sponsored widespread violence. It actually happened."

After the speech, "The Purge" was trending on X for 11 hours.

The Nazi-orchestrated Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," was a wave of violent attacks against Jewish people throughout Germany and Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Jewish people, businesses, homes, houses of worship, schools and cemeteries were attacked, vandalized and desecrated during the pogroms, or organized massacres of a particular ethnic group.

Nearly 100 Jews were killed and many more were injured during Kristallnacht, while more than 7,000 Jewish businesses and hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, according to the ADL. Additionally, 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

However, some Trump-supporting accounts disputed the comparison to Kristallnacht, including @jpksilver, who wrote, "Apparently Kristallnacht is trending because miseducated twerps think jews and shoplifters are the same," and @ScandinavianBot, who wrote, "WTAF? I listened to the whole thing waiting to hear him say "kristallnacht." He never did. Seems YOU are implying Jewish people are criminals with this tweet. Gross."

Another user, @backtobackdawgs, said their parents and grandparents lived through Kristallnacht, and they agreed with Trump that there needed to be a crackdown on crime. They wrote on X:

"I'm a child and grandchild of Kristallnacht. I fully comprehend its meaning. He's not wrong. We live in a time where people break laws routinely. No one does anything, DA's reduce charges or release criminals repeatedly. Never-ending crime. Don't be naive as to what needs done."

Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsyvlania, September 29, 2024. At the rally, he called for "one really violent day" to crack down on shoplifting, drawing comparisons to The Purge and to... Rebecca Droke/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump said the single day of violence was necessary to restore order, due to the police being allegedly unable to prevent shoplifting due to an alleged policy he alleged Kamala Harris enacted as District Attorney of San Francisco: that it is legal to shoplift goods valued under $950 in California.

"You can steal whatever you want. You can go away, but you'd see, originally you saw kids walk in with calculators. They were calculating. They didn't want to go over the $950," Trump said. "They're standing with a calculator adding it up. You know, these are smart, smart people. They're not so stupid, but they have to be taught."

This claim is false. In California, stealing less than $950 of goods is against the law, but is charged as a misdemeanor, not a felony.

Shoplifting is punishable by up to six months in prison and a fine of $1,000. The law to charge shoplifting as a misdemeanor rather than a felony, called Proposition 47, was enacted in 2014, not by Harris, who was attorney general at that time, but rather by the state's voters in a referendum. They voted in favor of the proposition 59 percent to 40 percent.

According to data from the California Department of Justice, shoplifting rates increased slightly for a year after the proposition was passed, and began to decrease from 2015. As of 2022, the shoplifting rate has not returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.

Update 09/30/24 12:32 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Trump's campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung."

Donald Trump's Call for 'Really Violent Day' Compared to 'The Purge' - Newsweek

Opinion This election is really about one big disagreement

Perry Bacon Jr.September 30, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

A person walks with an U.S.-flag-themed umbrella outside the White House on July 4. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post) 

“Some historians and political experts compare today to the era leading up to the Civil War and the 1960s. America is deeply split along ideological, regional and party lines. We’ve had numerous recent instances of political violence, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; the attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband while she was House speaker; and two different attempts to assassinate former president Donald Trump.

Others dismiss such comparisons, because America today does not seem to have a single issue at the center of its tensions, in the way that slavery divided the country in the mid-1800s and civil rights did a century later.

But there actually is a big, core, overarching point of conflict: culture and values. There are huge divides between the Republican and Democratic parties over issues such as abortion, immigration and race. These are fights about policy, but they are also part of a broader debate about what kinds of people and actions should be considered normal and acceptable.

The contest between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris seems so high-stakes and fraught because it is: One vision of American culture will prevail, and another will be defeated.

Follow Perry Bacon Jr.

The winning side won’t be able to impose its vision on the whole country, because the losing side will include tens of millions of people and will control about half of the states. But those who vote for the losing candidate are going to be extremely disheartened: America won’t be the country they thought it was — or could become.

Dozens of issues reflect this divide, but here some of the most obvious:

• Trump would try to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, block refugees from coming to the United States from some majority-Muslim countries and end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Harris wouldn’t do any of that and would probably continue President Joe Biden’s attempts to grant legal status to at least some of the undocumented.
• Harris will strongly defend abortion rights; Trump would likely further curtail them.
• Trump is proposing to ban the teaching of critical race theory and strongly opposes diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Harris would likely continue Biden’s push to reduce racial and gender disparities.
• Trump plans to enact numerous limits on gender-affirming health care; Harris would likely maintain Biden’s pro-transgender policies.
• Trump wants local police departments to restore “stop and frisk” tacticsand other more punitive practices. Harris would likely continue the Biden administration’s investigations of police departments that have been criticized for treating Black people in particular unfairly.

Broadly, Harris’s policies would give more power and autonomy to African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, transgender Americans, women and other groups that have historically been diminished. Trump policies would roll back benefits and protections for those groups and instead reflect the preferences of conservative White Christians.

You might not think of any of those issues individually as existential or ranking anywhere near slavery or Jim Crow. But the 2024 election combines those issues together, with Harris having the more liberal (or, in my view, more tolerant) stance on all of them. That adds up to a huge difference. If Trump is elected, the United States will have a president who is significantly more antiabortion, anti-transgender, anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action than his opponent would have been.

The parties differ over economic issues, too. But disagreements about tax rates and regulations on corporations are not why so many Americans today can’t talk to their relatives about politics without it turning into a fight. For many Harris voters, respecting women means making sure women can easily get an abortion if they want. For many Trump voters, respecting women means ensuring people whose sex assigned at birth was female don’t have to share public bathrooms with people whose sex assigned at birth was male.

These differences are emotional and personal.

Until recently, the two parties were not so starkly polarized along these cultural lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush extolled the virtues of immigration; Bill Clinton, Biden and other Democrats expressed wariness about abortion. Even in 2016, transgender rights hadn’t yet fully emerged as another point of division between the parties.

Over the past decade, Trump on the right and social movements such #MeToo and Black Lives Matter on the left have supercharged existing cultural divides. And while the Republican Party has shifted on many issues, particularly in becoming more anti-immigration, Democrats have changed, too.

The stance now dominant in the Democratic Party, that women should be able to terminate their pregnancies without feeling any guilt or shame, even if they don’t have a health condition or some other unusually complicated circumstance, is fairly new. (Remember Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” abortion mantra.) Democrats now define racism as not just individual acts of bigotry but also structures and systems that result in disparities between racial and ethnic groups. (I agree with the updated Democratic positions on these issues.)

And although these topics are sometimes dismissed as “culture wars” — as if people were disagreeing about which movies they liked — abortion, immigration and other such issues are very important and at times matters of life and death. ProPublica recently detailed the death of a Georgia woman after doctors there delayed certain procedures because they were wary of violating the state’s strict antiabortion laws. A country that restricts education about its long history of anti-Black racism is probably not one that is going to drastically reduce the number of Black people unjustly killed by the police.

I am not suggesting that all average voters are either uniformly liberal or conservative on these cultural issues. Harris is moving to the right on immigration (and Trump to the left on abortion) because there are millions of Americans who are either conflicted or have a mix of left and right positions on them.

But most politicians, interest groups, television networks (Fox and MSNBC) and other powerful forces in each party fully embrace their side’s cultural agenda. You aren’t going to hear skepticism about abortion rights on MSNBC or passionate defenses of transgender rights from Republican members of Congress. U.S. institutions are amplifying and reinforcing the cultural-partisan divide.

These big cultural differences mean that every national election in America really matters. I’m very worried about Trump winning because he is opposed to basic democratic norms, such as respecting election results. But I would still be pretty freaked out if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican who might honor the democratic process but also strongly advocates conservative cultural positions were the party’s nominee and tied with Harris in the key swing states, as Trump is now.

In my view, Harris voters are correct about LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, race and, more broadly, what kind of country America should be. I will be deeply unsettled if our side loses. I assume many conservatives feel the same.

This election feels so existential because it actually is.“

Opinion This election is really about one big disagreement

Perry Bacon Jr.September 30, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

A person walks with an U.S.-flag-themed umbrella outside the White House on July 4. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post) 

“Some historians and political experts compare today to the era leading up to the Civil War and the 1960s. America is deeply split along ideological, regional and party lines. We’ve had numerous recent instances of political violence, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; the attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband while she was House speaker; and two different attempts to assassinate former president Donald Trump.

Others dismiss such comparisons, because America today does not seem to have a single issue at the center of its tensions, in the way that slavery divided the country in the mid-1800s and civil rights did a century later.

But there actually is a big, core, overarching point of conflict: culture and values. There are huge divides between the Republican and Democratic parties over issues such as abortion, immigration and race. These are fights about policy, but they are also part of a broader debate about what kinds of people and actions should be considered normal and acceptable.

The contest between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris seems so high-stakes and fraught because it is: One vision of American culture will prevail, and another will be defeated.

Follow Perry Bacon Jr.

The winning side won’t be able to impose its vision on the whole country, because the losing side will include tens of millions of people and will control about half of the states. But those who vote for the losing candidate are going to be extremely disheartened: America won’t be the country they thought it was — or could become.

Dozens of issues reflect this divide, but here some of the most obvious:

• Trump would try to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, block refugees from coming to the United States from some majority-Muslim countries and end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Harris wouldn’t do any of that and would probably continue President Joe Biden’s attempts to grant legal status to at least some of the undocumented.
• Harris will strongly defend abortion rights; Trump would likely further curtail them.
• Trump is proposing to ban the teaching of critical race theory and strongly opposes diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Harris would likely continue Biden’s push to reduce racial and gender disparities.
• Trump plans to enact numerous limits on gender-affirming health care; Harris would likely maintain Biden’s pro-transgender policies.
• Trump wants local police departments to restore “stop and frisk” tacticsand other more punitive practices. Harris would likely continue the Biden administration’s investigations of police departments that have been criticized for treating Black people in particular unfairly.

Broadly, Harris’s policies would give more power and autonomy to African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, transgender Americans, women and other groups that have historically been diminished. Trump policies would roll back benefits and protections for those groups and instead reflect the preferences of conservative White Christians.

You might not think of any of those issues individually as existential or ranking anywhere near slavery or Jim Crow. But the 2024 election combines those issues together, with Harris having the more liberal (or, in my view, more tolerant) stance on all of them. That adds up to a huge difference. If Trump is elected, the United States will have a president who is significantly more antiabortion, anti-transgender, anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action than his opponent would have been.

The parties differ over economic issues, too. But disagreements about tax rates and regulations on corporations are not why so many Americans today can’t talk to their relatives about politics without it turning into a fight. For many Harris voters, respecting women means making sure women can easily get an abortion if they want. For many Trump voters, respecting women means ensuring people whose sex assigned at birth was female don’t have to share public bathrooms with people whose sex assigned at birth was male.

These differences are emotional and personal.

Until recently, the two parties were not so starkly polarized along these cultural lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush extolled the virtues of immigration; Bill Clinton, Biden and other Democrats expressed wariness about abortion. Even in 2016, transgender rights hadn’t yet fully emerged as another point of division between the parties.

Over the past decade, Trump on the right and social movements such #MeToo and Black Lives Matter on the left have supercharged existing cultural divides. And while the Republican Party has shifted on many issues, particularly in becoming more anti-immigration, Democrats have changed, too.

The stance now dominant in the Democratic Party, that women should be able to terminate their pregnancies without feeling any guilt or shame, even if they don’t have a health condition or some other unusually complicated circumstance, is fairly new. (Remember Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” abortion mantra.) Democrats now define racism as not just individual acts of bigotry but also structures and systems that result in disparities between racial and ethnic groups. (I agree with the updated Democratic positions on these issues.)

And although these topics are sometimes dismissed as “culture wars” — as if people were disagreeing about which movies they liked — abortion, immigration and other such issues are very important and at times matters of life and death. ProPublica recently detailed the death of a Georgia woman after doctors there delayed certain procedures because they were wary of violating the state’s strict antiabortion laws. A country that restricts education about its long history of anti-Black racism is probably not one that is going to drastically reduce the number of Black people unjustly killed by the police.

I am not suggesting that all average voters are either uniformly liberal or conservative on these cultural issues. Harris is moving to the right on immigration (and Trump to the left on abortion) because there are millions of Americans who are either conflicted or have a mix of left and right positions on them.

But most politicians, interest groups, television networks (Fox and MSNBC) and other powerful forces in each party fully embrace their side’s cultural agenda. You aren’t going to hear skepticism about abortion rights on MSNBC or passionate defenses of transgender rights from Republican members of Congress. U.S. institutions are amplifying and reinforcing the cultural-partisan divide.

These big cultural differences mean that every national election in America really matters. I’m very worried about Trump winning because he is opposed to basic democratic norms, such as respecting election results. But I would still be pretty freaked out if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican who might honor the democratic process but also strongly advocates conservative cultural positions were the party’s nominee and tied with Harris in the key swing states, as Trump is now.

In my view, Harris voters are correct about LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, race and, more broadly, what kind of country America should be. I will be deeply unsettled if our side loses. I assume many conservatives feel the same.

This election feels so existential because it actually is.“

State of the Race: A Calm Week and Perhaps the Clearest Picture Yet - The New York Times

State of the Race: A Calm Week and Perhaps the Clearest Picture Yet

"It’s getting easier to trust that the news isn’t driving the numbers, and we take a closer look at the Hispanic vote.

Sept. 30, 2024, 10:21 a.m. ET2m ago

For the moment, Kamala Harris’s weakest poll results are in Arizona. Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Sept. 30, 2024Updated 10:07 a.m. ET

With five weeks to go until the election, the polls show a close and stable race for president.

Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald J. Trump by three percentage points in The New York Times’s average of national polls, while the race remains extraordinarily close in the seven key battleground states. No candidate enjoys a significant lead in states worth the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

If you’ve read this weekly polling update before, that summary might sound pretty familiar. The polls have been remarkably steady, with no clear indications of any meaningful shift either way.

Still, there is something different about the polls this past week. It’s not a difference in the top-line numbers, but the context: This was a relatively calm week of political news, at least compared with the last few months. As a result, this might be the clearest read we’ve had of the race so far. It was arguably the first “quiet” week since Vice President Harris’s entry into the race.

Think of all that happened from late July to mid-September. Over just that short span, Ms. Harris became her party’s nominee; she selected her vice-presidential running mate; the Democrats held their convention; Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump debated; and then an assassination attempt against Mr. Trump was thwarted on Sept. 15.

At every stage, these events made it harder to be sure the polls were offering a relatively unvarnished assessment of the race. It was reasonable to wonder, for instance, whether Ms. Harris’s standing was being inflated by a series of media-driven bounces. Good news for Mr. Trump, on the other hand, could be interpreted as a sign that an earlier Harris bounce was fading.

This week, it’s getting easier to trust that the news isn’t driving the numbers. It’s been three weeks since the debate and two weeks since the assassination attempt, and there’s been plenty of nonpolitical news in the headlines. This includes the Fed’s rate cutting, Hurricane Helene and the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Even the big political news — the indictment of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams — didn’t have much bearing on the presidential matchup.

There are a few hints that, perhaps, Ms. Harris’s numbers have slipped a bit since the post-debate polls — more on that in a bit. But on balance, a relatively calm and neutral political environment returned and it didn’t require any major revision to our understanding of the race.

As a result, we can be more confident in this week’s state of the race roundup, even though the numbers don’t look very different.

What if the polls are wrong?

While a relatively quiet political environment makes us more confident in the state of the race, there are still no guarantees.

If the polls are off as they were two or four years ago, the outcome might be very different than the polls suggest today. Either candidate could win decisively.

	Polling Leader	If Polls miss like they did in …
		2022	2020
National	+3 Harris	+3 Harris	+1 Trump
Wisconsin	+2 Harris	+4 Harris	+8 Trump
Nevada	+1 Harris	+4 Harris	+2 Trump
Michigan	+1 Harris	+7 Harris	+4 Trump
Pennsylvania	+1 Harris	+6 Harris	+3 Trump
North Carolina	Even	+1 Harris	+4 Trump
Georgia	+1 Trump	+1 Trump	+3 Trump
Arizona	+2 Trump	+1 Harris	+5 Trump

Includes polling as of Sept. 29. See the latest polling averages »

Electoral votes counting only states where a candidate leads by 3 or more:

Electoral votes if current polling translates perfectly to results (it won’t):

Electoral votes if state polls miss in the same way they did in 2020:

Electoral votes if state polls miss in the same way they did in 2022:

Includes polling as of Sept. 29. See the latest polling averages »

With this much uncertainty, the polls don’t suggest that either candidate is a clear favorite. At this point, there’s a good chance they never will.

Arizona and Pennsylvania

While the poll averages didn’t move much last week, they did budge in Pennsylvania and Arizona, two states where we got the most new high-quality polling.

In each case, the averages shifted a tad toward Mr. Trump — though not enough to change the big picture.

In the reckoning of our average, Pennsylvania is now virtually a dead heat. Ms. Harris’s lead is under one point, which hardly counts as a lead at all; Fox News, Susquehanna and Muhlenberg College polls all showed a tie.

This raises the possibility of a slight dip for Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania, as she led by about two points in a wave of high-quality polls immediately after the presidential debate. Oddly, an unusually large share of the high-quality polling post-debate was focused on Pennsylvania, so it’s possible that a receding post-debate bounce would only be discernible in Pennsylvania.

Arizona is the other state with plenty of high-quality polling, and it’s now the battleground state where Mr. Trump fares best in our average, with a two-point lead.

The balance of the high-quality polling in Arizona this past week was arguably even better for Mr. Trump than that, as he led by six points in a USA Today/Suffolk poll, by three in a Fox poll, by one via Marist, and by five in the Times/Siena poll released last Monday.

One factor in Mr. Trump’s strength appears to be the state’s Hispanic vote. Of the four high-quality polls released this past week, none showed Ms. Harris leading among Hispanic voters by more than 12 points, even though most estimates suggest President Biden won by at least 20 points among Hispanic voters when he narrowly carried the state four years ago.

Hispanic voters

The past week also provided a national snapshot of the Hispanic vote, thanks to two high-quality polls of Hispanic voters conducted by Pew Research and NBC News/Telemundo.

The polls told the same story: Mr. Trump is doing better among Hispanic voters than four years ago, when Mr. Biden outgained him among them, 62-36.

NBC/Telemundo showed Ms. Harris up by just 14 points among Hispanic voters, 54-40, while Pew Research found her up by 18, 57-39.

The two tallies are similar to a compilation of Times/Siena national polls, which have shown Ms. Harris up by 56-39 among Hispanic voters. We’ll have our own deep polling dive on Hispanic voters soon.

Mr. Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters this cycle might seem surprising, but four years ago he made big gains among them across the country. And in 2016, he fared no worse than Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among them, even though his anti-immigration rhetoric created the expectation of a significant backlash. In retrospect, his resilience among Hispanic voters in 2016 looks like a harbinger of what was to come.

This time, his strength might help him in two states with large Hispanic populations, Arizona and Nevada. It might also help him in the national popular vote, as Hispanic voters disproportionately live in noncompetitive states like California and Texas.

Nonetheless, a good showing for Mr. Trump among Hispanic voters won’t do as much for him in the states that seem to represent Ms. Harris’s best path to victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling. More about Nate Cohn"

State of the Race: A Calm Week and Perhaps the Clearest Picture Yet - The New York Times