NY Times Column: Trump Really COULD Shoot Someone on 5th Avenue

Famously, during the primaries, Donald Trump claimed at a rally that he could “shoot someone in the middle of 5^th Avenue and still not lose any voters.” This sparked a lot of talk, mostly because just about EVERYTHING Trump did or said at that time sparked a lot of talk, but also because there was a kernel of truth to it. Trump was running into breathless controversies nearly every single day at one point in the campaign – controversies that would have easily felled any other candidate. And yet his polls kept ticking up and up and up. Even so, most reasonable people understood that he was being hyperbolic and that he could not, indeed MURDER SOMEONE and still win the election.

But now we’re to understand from New York Times liberal Thomas Friedman that the past two years of Trump’s presidency prove that he could indeed shoot someone and get away with it. Friedman gets to this point via a invented news story covering the imaginary shooting:

President Trump stopped his motorcade in Manhattan today, jumped out of his limousine and shot a man on Fifth Avenue who was shouting anti-Trump epithets. The shooting was recorded by the White House press pool as well as by dozens of bystanders with cellphones and by security cameras in the area. When asked for his reaction, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “We will need more information than is available at this point.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said through pursed lips that he “was not going to comment on every up and down with this president.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said he already had information indicating that the man whom Trump shot “worked for the Clinton Foundation and may have been a relative of former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.”

We have to admit it was one of the more amusing columns we’ve read from a leftist in some time, but the premise is absurd. What is it that Trump has “gotten away with” over the last year and a half that would lead one to suspect that his fellow Republicans could even look the other way on a blatant homicide? Let’s allow Friedman to explain…

Reading…reading…

…And he never names a single example.

No, instead Friedman uses the rest of his column to go on a bizarre tangent about how Trump is “Russia-fying” the United States – a premise that seems to have little to nothing to do with the invented news article he started the column with nor the idea that he could kill someone and his supporters would still frantically cheer him. And thus a column which might have had some meat on the bone became just another example of a liberal elitist whining about a president who DGAF about political correctness, Obama’s legacy, or the polite norms of politics past.