First up: I wrote a piece for The Guardian about the removal of Kevin McCarthy. The core message of the article is this:
The truth is that McCarthy has been at the cutting edge of his party’s descent into madness, encouraging its worst instincts and indulging its most destructive personalities. People sometimes say that the congressional Republican party has become “ungovernable”. It’s more accurate to say that it has been deliberately radicalized – and that Kevin McCarthy played a key role in that process.
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Although there’s a Republican primary going on, it isn’t competitive, and Donald Trump is ignoring it and running against the people he sees as his real opponents. This includes not just Joe Biden, but also everybody who he feels wronged him during his last time in office, not to mention anybody involved in one of the many ongoing criminal and civil cases against him. Over the past few weeks, it’s become increasingly clear that he intends to run this campaign with absolutely no regard for common standards of decency, and with no concern that he might get someone killed.
After the January 6th insurrection, Trump has absolutely no excuse for pretending to think that his violent rhetoric can somehow be separated from the real-world actions of his supporters. This is a man who has incited violence and gotten people killed before, and who clearly has the power to do it again. If he proceeds to say things that have the potential to lead to a repeat, we have to assume that it’s a deliberate attempt to intimidate or cause actual harm to his opponents. And this, unfortunately, is what he’s doing in spades.
I already talked in my last post about how Trump said that Mark Milley, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for “treason”. He’s also recently advocated that shoplifters be shot as they leave stores, in rhetoric echoing his request that the military shoot migrants crossing the border, as reported in 2019. On the first day of his civil trial in New York relating to fraudulent business practices, Trump suggested that people ought to “go after” the judge. And in perhaps his most shocking remarks, he also recently made light of the hammer attack which nearly killed Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul last year. As per the Times:
“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump said, before pausing and looking out at the crowd.
“How’s her husband doing, by the way, anybody know?” he deadpanned, drawing laughter and a smattering of applause. “She’s against building a wall at our border even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”
Just as disturbing as Trump’s remarks is the laughter that it drew from the crowd - in fact in almost every instance of his use of violent rhetoric, the conservative or Republican (or both) crowd listening has cheered, laughed or applauded. This on its own is a reminder that something dark has come over American politics in the last decade, something that allows Trump supporters to laugh at or otherwise appreciate the spectre of violence. Remember, the violence Trump is speaking of here is not hypothetical - it has actually happened, and it has been committed by people who support Trump. Yet the prospect of more is apparently one big joke to crowds of Trump supporters - or something to be applauded.
Given the way that a current of violence throbs through the Trump movement, his demonizing of other figures carries violent connotations even when he doesn’t directly connect them to a call for physical abuse. When he brands the media or liberals or someone else as “the enemies of the people”, he places them outside the mainstream of respectable society in such a way that seems designed to make them targets of attack. Trump recently chose Rosh Hashanah as the occasion to post an attack on “liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel”, the sort of extreme language designed to paint a whole class of people as traitors who are deserving of extirpation. He knows exactly how this can end, because someone steeped in the conspiracy theories that he promotes has killed Jews out of hatred before. Yet he does it anyway.
Trump also shows a complete callous indifference to the people whose lives he destroys even when actual violence doesn’t materialize. Thanks to Trump, literally hundreds of people - from politicians to election officials, even to Mark Milley - have faced death threats, threats against the safety of their families, and worse. Trump’s election conspiracy theories led some poll workers who were falsely accused of committing fraud to have to change their identities and go into hiding. Law enforcement is a target too: threats against the FBI, which Trump portrays as a malignant institution which needs to be destroyed, are up 300%.
As Trump’s many trials proceeds, this problem is only going to get worse. As I’ve written in another post, Trump is not even trying to mount a serious legal defense in any of his cases so far. This was obvious in the first few days of the New York civil trial, in which Trump aggressively assailed the very judge who will ultimately decide his fate - pretty much the opposite of what any sane defendant would do. Trump is instead trying to mount a political defense, calling into question the legitimacy and trustworthiness of the courts and law enforcement. We know how this story ends, too, because we’ve seen it before - all conservative media, from QAnon hellholes to the rarefied halls of the Wall Street Journal, will soon coalesce around the idea that Trump is in fact being stitched up by a corrupt system. In the heat of next year’s legal and political maelstrom, there’s a high likelihood that this narrative will inspire someone to do something really stupid - and really deadly.