Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris stopped her fans from getting too wild with their Trump bashing at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday.
On the second day of her battleground blitz with running mate Tim Walz, when she got to the point in her now-familiar stump speech about her days prosecuting predators, fraudsters and scammers, supporters, like those in Philadelphia on Tuesday, were just starting to chant “lock him up” when Harris deviated from the script.
“Well, hold on,” she said, holding out her hand as if to placate the crowd in Eau Claire, Wisc. “You know what, the courts are going to handle that part of it. What we’re gonna do is beat him in November.”
Calling for someone who commits crimes to be locked up is absolutely fine and good.
Calling on a political leader to make that happen is not.
“Lock him/her up” has a very specific history in this context. It was Trump promising that as president he would pervert the normal course of justice to attack his political opponents. That’s how dictatorships work, not democracies.