In the wake of another terrorist attack, this one killing at least 36 people and wounding over 100 at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, Donald Trump wasted no time in returning to a familiar well of atrocity and aggression. In a speech to supporters in Clairesville, Ohio just hours after the attack, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee reiterated his past support for waterboarding, and called for the United States needs to match ISIS beheading-for-beheading.
“We’re living in Medieval times,” Trump said of the ISIS atrocities, and added “We have to stop it. We have to be so strong, we have to fight so viciously and so violently, because we’re dealing with violent people, vicious people.”
He then explicitly indicated that the United States should respond in kind:
So we can’t do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages. They can do whatever they want to do. They eat dinner like us. Can you imagine them sitting around the table or wherever they’re eating their dinner, talking about the Americans don’t do waterboarding and yet we chop off heads. They probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership. You know, you have to fight fire with fire.
The crowd