Trump's firearms license
I had sworn to lay off publicly venting my anger over comments made by US President Donald Trump. Anger distorts the view on his administration's policies. And that is probably the overriding aim of many of his incendiary remarks in interviews, at campaign rallies and on Twitter.
It is time to break that particular oath.
Trump is planning to send 15,000 soldiers to the Mexican border to stop the so-called migrant caravan in its tracks. He claims to have told the military that troops should react to thrown rocks as they would to gunshots.
It is unlikely that an overwhelming force of US soldiers will shoot live ammunition at migrants. The troops are only supposed to provide border police with logistical support: Build fences, erect tents, supply vehicles. They are prohibited from arresting or taking direct action against migrants.
Trump the role model
Trump doesn't explicitly say soldiers should shoot at migrants, but as so often, he does give his supporters room for interpretation. By lauding a Congressman's physical attack on a journalist — as he did at a rally in Montana — he is implicitly suggesting that violence against journalists is fine. Colleagues covering Republican campaign rallies have since reported receiving threats.
A man who groped the breasts of a female sitting in the row in front during a flight from Texas to New Mexico referred to his president, who once famously said it was fine to grab women in intimate areas.
The US president proudly asserted "I am a nationalist," only to claim he was unaware the term had racist connotations. But once again, he had given a signal to his supporters on the far-right.
Read more: Is Donald Trump the Democratic Party's 'unwitting unifier'?
Trump the cause
It is going too far to lay the blame for the pipe bombs sent to his opponents solely at Trump's door. Or for the terror attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh. But he assigned a permit for these acts with a rhetoric that invents and dramatizes a potential threat and simultaneously approves of violence.
In the current case, not to the soldiers, rather to Trump's supporters. The largest groups of migrants, numbering around 7,000 people, are still in the deep south of Mexico. But people try to cross the border from Mexico into the US every single day. If one of them is shot by a Trump supporter, the 45th US president will have the death on his conscience.
On November 1, 2018, he issued a license to shoot migrants.