Trump has said that he wants to send the whack job who killed 8 people in New York last week to Gitmo.
What Trump is doing here, he's been doing long enough and well enough that it's starting to become quite obvious.
His game is to constantly own the news cycle.
And the way that you constantly own the news cycle is by being outrageous.
He did this on the primary trail, and many of us were sitting there thinking, 'there's no way this guy even wants to be president.'
Saying John McCain is not a war hero, for example. This going after iconic figures in the Republican Party, that George W Bush was the worst president ever, and the Iraq war was the biggest military mistake ever made.
I don't disagree with those sentiments, but they're the kind of things that earned Trump - and I say earned advisedly, he knew what he was doing - earned him the news cycle on those days that he dropped those stories.
And it worked for him. He got the presidential nomination and then he did the same thing in the general election and it got him the White House.
And his strategy is always, OK, you look at a situation, we're getting bad coverage, how do we change this? Do or say the most outrageous thing you can think of.
And not only do you then get your name mentioned thousands of times by people on the other side of the issue, but you also get all the Sturm and Drang from the news media.
The news media: "oh my god, how can he say that? How could he do...? He really went there?" Yeah, of course he's going to do that.
This guy is a demagogue.
He is absolutely committed to doing whatever increases his own power and wealth, the two being relatively indistinguishable. And nothing else.
I mean, Donald Trump is all about Donald Trump and maybe a few members of his family, and that's it.
And now we're seeing this with his pathetic attempts to seize the news cycle. Well, pathetic, but actually successful. Here we are discussing it.
But I think it's important to point out that this is just a political strategy. This has nothing to do with reality. This has nothing to do with getting the best outcome.
You had a bunch of prosecutions that were done in US civil courts of major terrorist figures and they're sitting in maximum security prisons and they're never going to go anywhere.
This is just pure political grandstanding on Trump's part.
Is it getting you?
Do you know people who are being influenced by him in this regard?
Is it working or is it starting to fade away?
