Back in WC’s anti-Vietnam War demonstration days, hecklers would shout at anti-war protesters, “America, love it or leave it” in response to protests against the disaster that was the Vietnam War. The hecklers weren’t talking about love, of course; they were telling WC and his fellow protestors to unquestioningly support whatever stupid and dangerous folly elected leaders wanted. Never mind the constitutional right to peacefully protest. Never mind that you could love your country and still completely disagree with Lyndon Johnson’s and Dick Nixon’s stupid, evil war.1
Donald Trump has dragged out that same old, stupid heckling trope, and is trying to turn it into an election tool. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said on May 14, according to donors at the event. As is typical of Donald Trump, he was vague and ambiguous about which students he was going to throw out. All students or just foreign students here under visas? Students engaged in peaceful protests or only violent protestors?
Is Trump seriously threatening to kick American citizens out of the country for protesting or committing crimes? If so, he needs to look in the mirror. He’s been convicted of 34 felonies. And counting. Let’s assume Trump is only talking about folks here on a student visas, although with a dictator-wannabe, you can’t be sure.
So he’s going to throw foreign students out. How would that work, anyway? Suppose Clyde Bushmat, a Czech national, lawfully in the U.S. on a student visa, protests something. Trump would throw him out of the country how? Clyde has a visa which regulates what he can and cannot do while in the U.S. Only Congress, not Trump, can change the terms of the visa. Currently, there is no prohibition on participating in peaceful demonstrations; Congress would have to amend the laws on student visas for Trump to have the authority he claims he has. You know, make them more anti-American, even more sharply in contrast to American values and the U.S. Constitution. If Clyde was convicted of committing a crime of moral turpitude or a drug offense, sure, he loses his student visa. But peaceful protests are not a violation of the law, let alone a felony, and Donald Trump cannot, by executive fiat, make it a ground of deportation.
Sure, Trump’s threat to “throw them out of the country” is only one of the dozens of utterly despotic, anti-constitutional threats he has made in his 2024 election campaign. But WC mentions it because it is not just utterly wrong; it has been proven to be utterly wrong. WC recognizes that the average American voter doesn’t have any sense of history. If they did, Trump’s 2024 candidacy would be DOA. Heck, we know Trump is willing to tear gar peaceful protesters to give himself a photo opportunity; he did so in June 2020.
Trump. Just say no.
1 Of course, Donald “Bone Spurs” Trump dodged service in Vietnam. WC has no information one way or the other on whether he was heckling anti-war protesters. It’s damned certain he wasn’t a protester himself.
Wickersham's Conscience 
The better chant was “change it or lose it” IMO
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I grew up in the segregated South, can be described as American Apartheid, a favorite expression of those (including family members) who despised the civil rights movement and integration was “you don’t like the way we do things here, go back to Africa”. Trump is skilled at knowing what his cult will gobble up, “throw them out of the country” is the same sort of red meat. Irrational, ugly and dangerous red meat.
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How many peaceful protests edge over into violence only when law enforcement rolls in and begins swinging their truncheons?
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Of the demonstrations I’ve been at that rolled into violence (2), the police provoked the violence 100% of the time.
/WC
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