The Purge is a movie franchise that has existed since 2013. It is centered on a scenario in which crime is made legal for 12 hours once a year. Five movies and a TV series have been made, with a sixth film currently in the works. One of them, The Purge: Election Year, arrived in the summer of 2016, shortly before Donald Trump’s election.
No government has ever enacted or proposed a real-life version of The Purge. But over the weekend, Trump appeared to suggest something like that.
Speaking at a Saturday rally in Erie, Pa., the former president and Republican nominee got into one of his usual bouts of free association. And it ended up suggesting something resembling The Purge.
Trump began talking about some jurisdictions that have stopped treating shoplifting below a certain amount as a felony and stated, “You saw kids walk in with calculators,” supposedly to determine that what they were stealing was below that threshold.
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Then, Trump declared that “if you had one violent day,” one presided over by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), in whose district the rally was held, “One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out, and it will end immediately.”
Granted, Trump was not suggesting legalizing crime, but rather, it appears, a one-hour period in which police would be “rough” about shoplifters, it would cut down on retail crime. t
Trump appears to endorse ‘The Purge’ as policy:
“If you had one really violent day.. .. … One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.” @Acyn
pic.twitter.com/SlqxPfF97B— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) September 29, 2024
It’s not clear if there’s any truth to the story about shoplifters with calculators, as no news reports have substantiated that, although one group of teens in New York, in 2023, were reported to have stolen more than $40,000 worth of calculators in a series of heists.
Trump has in the past called for police to be rougher with suspects, including his use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — one he borrowed from a notoriously racist Southern sheriff in the 1960s — during the unrest following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Quite a few people noticed the resemblance of Trump’s proposal to The Purge:
I posted this 10 days ago, and today Trump literally called for ‘The Purge’ pic.twitter.com/2VwFBwAr5h
— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) September 29, 2024
Did Trump watch the Purge or just independently come up with the same idea https://t.co/QLGQqFvZQy
— Paul Blest (@pblest) September 29, 2024
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…”pic.twitter.com/uX5dQu8B1a
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) September 30, 2024
It’s unclear if Trump is familiar at all with the Purge franchise.
Image courtesy of the Political Tribune photo library.
