A new Tuesday report in Rolling Stone about disgraced former President Trump asking around about how he can jail journalists seems a little cliched and over-the-top. “This year, as Trump has privately strategized about what a second term, potentially starting in 2025, could look like, he’s begun occasionally soliciting ideas from conservative allies for how the U.S. government and Justice Department could go about turning his desires – for brutally imprisoning significant numbers of reporters – into reality,” write Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng in the article.
It all comes across a bit hackneyed. Like of course Trump aspires to be the second coming of Hitler or Stalin, but couldn’t he come up with something a little more original than just simply brutally cracking down on the free press by imprisoning them? The whole “authoritarian playbook” trope about Trump is stale. We new ideas and new leadership if America is to become a nightmarish right wing dictatorship, not the same shit that was said and done in the early 20th century.