An 87 Year Old NJ State Senator Just Did-- Plus Trump's New Idea For A TV Show
Ted Cruz, one of the most disliked members of the Senate (by other senators) and one of the most disliked senator (by Americans), has decided not to humiliate himself again by running for president. Arkansas’ newly unemployed ex-governor, Asa Hutchinson, on the other hand, wants to fight for the nonexistent not-Trump lane. In the end, it’s probably going to come down to a contest between Trump and Meatball Ron.
Yesterday, Rolling Stone reporters Aswan Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis offered readers another reason to do whatever they can to make sure Trump never gets to the White House again. He hasn’t proposed gladiatorial games for criminals yet, but… he’s getting closer. He’s all in on firing squads, hangings and guillotines and making TV shows out of executions. Trump, they reported, has “privately mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video-ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods. In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death. ‘The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,’ this source says. ‘He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.’… Trump’s enthusiasm for grisly video campaigns has been documented before, including in an anecdote from a former aide that had the then-president demanding footage of ‘people dying in a ditch’ and ‘bodies stacked on top of bodies’ so that his administration could ‘scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life.’”
At an October rally— to cheers and applause from his audience— Trump pitched a form of supposed justice that has been embraced by some brutal dictatorships. “And if [the drug dealer is] guilty, they get executed, and they send the bullet to the family and they want the family to pay for the cost of the bullet,” Trump said at the rally. “If you want to stop the drug epidemic in this country, you better do that … [even if] it doesn’t sound nice.”
…“In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’— that’s a direct quote— criminal-justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad,” says a former Trump White House official.
“You just got to kill these people,” Trump would stress, this ex-official notes.
“He had a particular affinity for the firing squad, because it seemed more dramatic, rather than how we do it, putting a syringe in people and putting them to sleep,” the former White House official adds. “He was big on the idea of executing large numbers of drug dealers and drug lords because he’d say, ‘These people don’t care about anything,’ and that they run their drug empire and their deals from prison anyways, and then they get back out on the street, get all their money again, and keep committing crimes … and therefore, they need to be eradicated, not jailed.”
Trump’s firing-squad fixation may address his desire for the “dramatic,” but some experts believe that an instant death-by-gunshot may be more humane than lethal injection. “There’s pain, certainly, but it’s transient,” according to Dr. Jonathan Groner, a professor of surgery at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. “If you’re shot in the chest and your heart stops functioning, it’s just seconds until you lose consciousness.”
Rules made during Trump’s presidency made federal firing squads more feasible. Previously, lethal injection was the only permissible federal method of execution. But under the administration’s new rules, if lethal injections are made legally or logistically unavailable, the federal government can use any method that is legal in the state where the execution is located.
The rule took effect on Dec. 24, 2020, and thus far has not been applied: All 13 Trump-era executions were done by lethal injection. But the expanded methods of execution could be relevant in the future. Opponents of the death penalty have pushed drugmakers to withhold the drugs needed to conduct lethal injections, complicating efforts to impose capital punishment. In Indiana, home to the Terre Haute facility where most federal executions are conducted, the new policies “legally open the door for the authorized use of firing squads, electrocution, or the gas chamber,” the Indianapolis Star reported at the time.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, the ideological architect of Trump’s execution binge, told Rolling Stone in December that Trump and his administration would have had more people put to death soon, had he won a second term in 2020. “Yes— that was the expectation,” Barr succinctly summarized in a phone interview.
New Jersey’s 12th legislative district, across the center of the state was drawn to be a red-leaning district— 40.3% unaffiliated, 30.7% Republican and 27.7% Democratic. It covers parts of Burlington, Middlesex, Monmouth and Ocean counties, although mostly Burlington and Monmouth counties. For over a decade, it has been sending 3 Republicans to Trenton— state Sen. Samuel Thompson (who is 87 years old) and Assemblymen Ronald Dancer and Robert Clifton. Thompson was first elected to the General Assembly in 1997. Yesterday, he suddenly switched parties and re-registered as a Democrat, although he was one of 6 Republicans who voted for Gov. Phil Murphy’s budget that included a tax on millionaires. He says he intends to run for reelection this year as a Democrat.
He said he quit the GOP because state party officials questioned his fitness for office based on his age and decided to back another candidate, Old Bridge Mayor Owen Henry. So it wasn’t because of Trump’s desire to make a show out of executions or because Ron DeSantis is a meatball. In fact, Thompson considers himself a Trumpist, was a Trump convention delegate and insists Trump’s time in the White House was a success. The Democrats, of course, were happy to welcome him, since there’s little they dote on more than on conservative and senile politicians. When is the Big Tent too big?
