Photo: David Greedy/Getty Images
Do you remember how Donald Trump repeatedly used the phrase “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, even calling for her to be tried, convicted, and sent to jail well after he defeated her in the 2016 presidential election?
According to Donald Trump, you don’t remember any of that.
No, you’re not crazy. And this isn’t a Berenstein Bears thing. The problem is that Trump is now a convicted felon who could potentially be locked up himself (though that probably won’t happen). This is a pretty embarrassing turn of events for a guy who’s been encouraging his supporters’ “Lock her up” chants for years. So in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, Trump decided to simply pretend he had never uttered the phrase himself.
“You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president,” Fox host Will Cain told Trump.
“I beat her,” Trump responded. “It’s easier when you win. And they always said ‘Lock her up,’ and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me.”
President Trump actually couldn’t have ordered law-enforcement officials to lock up Clinton for using a private email server while she was secretary of State; that’s not how our justice system works. But that’s a minor lie compared to what Trump said next.
“I didn’t say ‘Lock her up,’ but the people said ‘Lock her up, lock her up,” Trump claimed. “Then we won. And I say — and I said pretty openly, I said, ‘All right, come on, just relax, let’s go, we’ve got to make our country great.’”
So it’s still okay to recall Trump supporters chanting “Lock her up.” But please erase from your mind all these examples of Trump himself calling for Hillary’s incarceration, which were compiled by The Atlantic’s David A. Graham:
“‘Lock her up’ is right,” he said in October 2016. “For what she did, they should lock her up,” he said at a rally I attended in Greensboro, North Carolina, a few days later. He used other phrasings at other times. In June 2016, for example, he said, “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail. She has to go to jail,” helpfully adding for the historical record: “I said that.” As he noted in the interview, he eased off the demands once he’d won. But in 2020, running for reelection, he went back to playing the hits. “You should lock her up, I’ll tell you,” he said at an Ohio rally.
And you’re definitely going to want to forget about how Trump was still using the phrase as late as October 2020, saying of Clinton and the Biden family, “Lock them up. You should lock them up. Lock up the Bidens.”
I’ll let you take one last look at this video of Trump repeatedly saying “Lock her up” over the years:
But from now on we’re not going to talk about the emperor’s old catchphrase ever again. Sorry, I don’t make the rules — Trump does.
