Is Donald Trump’s ‘Kristallnacht’ speech his most dangerous yet?

Whenever Donald Trump talks, it can feel as though a dystopian movie is playing out before our very eyes. But his latest campaign speech was a classic of its type – and even darker than usual.

On Monday, in Erie, Pennsylvania, he floated some thoughts on how he would combat rising crime against shopkeepers if he were re-elected president – and what he proposed was scarily close to the premise of the horror franchise, The Purge.

For those who have not seen the films, once a year, for 12 hours, all crime in America is legal, including murder, rape and arson. As police forces stand aside, everyone gets a free pass to act as they please.

Trump’s suggestion would apply the same principle to policing – allowing law-enforcement units to use “extraordinarily rough” tactics over the course of “one really violent day… and I mean real rough. Word will get out and [crime] will end immediately,” he said.

You can understand why many people have drawn comparisons with the dystopian action-horror flicks; the trailer for the 2018 film, The First Purge, even contained a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” tagline, seemingly predicting what was to come.

And it’s terrifying, not just because it’s coming from one of the most powerful people in the world: it’s dangerous rhetoric that, if I didn’t know better, sounds a lot like inciting a riot.

Others drew comparisons with Trump’s “lawless police” idea to Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass – the violent, co-ordinated attacks orchestrated by the Nazi regime against Germany’s Jewish population that took place in November 1938. “In The Purge, the police won’t respond to calls for help,”journalist Noah Berlatsky wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Trump is proposing a state pogrom in