I don't quite understand what Donald Trump just said, especially the phrase in bold:
"Hillary wants to abolish—essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."
Best Answer
Many analysts, across the spectrum of political belief, claim that Mr Trump engages here in what is termed dog whistle political speech. In the same way that a dog whistle produces a tone which is audible to a dog but not to a human, dog whistle rhetoric carries a specific meaning which is clearly understood by the targeted audience, but which is sufficiently ambiguous that listeners outside of that targeted audience will not perceive it as they do.
In this case, the targeted audience is assumed by these analysts to comprise those Americans who believe that the Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is planning secretly to deprive them of their rights under the second amendment to the United States Constitution, which prevents the government from infringing upon their right "to keep and bear arms."
The aforementioned analysts deduce that the candidate here infers that the Second Amendment people (Americans who zealously defend that right and who own firearms) may be able to punish Ms Clinton should she be elected to the Presidency and succeed in her alleged plot to appoint Supreme Court justices who would somehow revoke the Second Amendment. Implicit in their deduction is the unsupported belief that the Second Amendment people are willing to employ violence in defense of their rights under that amendment. The dog whistle in their analysis is the unspoken threat that this punishment will be effected with firearms: that she (or the Supreme Court justices whom she might appoint) will be shot.
Mr Trump and his supporters rejoin that he intended to imply nothing of the sort, and that his statement was merely an admonition to vote against Ms Clinton.