Donald Trump Drops Threat of New Hillary Clinton Investigation
From: nytimes.com
“President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that he had no intention of pressing for an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server or the financial operations of her family’s foundation, dropping the “lock her up” pledge that became a rallying cry for his campaign for the White House.
Mr. Trump, who branded his rival “Crooked Hillary” and said she would go to jail if he were president, said in an interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times that he was no longer interested in pursuing Mrs. Clinton, in part because he wanted to heal the wounds of a divisive campaign.
“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Mr. Trump said during the interview. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.””
In 2016 the paper of record treated Trump’s dropping his pledge to lock up Hillary Clinton as if this was a totally normal story. Those chants of “lock her up” were not described as what they clearly were. Calls for a future president to jail his political rivals.
The Times covered Trump supporters being disappointed that they wouldn’t get to see an extrajudicial attack on Hillary Clinton as if this was a normal thing. As you read the article you can see the Times discussing the hurt feelings of Republicans while neglecting to mentioning that Hillary had already been investigated multiple times.
Reading the comments from Republicans should be a stunning reminder of how futile it is to reach out to them. They were totally OK with extrajudicial actions against Hillary. And if you were to look at the conservatives named in the article, likely none of them would have any history of supporting any investigations of Trump. They are unreachable.
This is why I think the problem here is the Times. As long as the Times allows Republicans to be normalized, you are never going to reach the large number of people who tune out politics and are not aware of what is at stake in the midterms. Not only was Trump given a chance, it was sources like the NY Times that led the way.