Trump supporter assassinates Democratic lawmakers

Blame the arsonist-in-chief

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Police have now arrested Vance Boelter, a Trump supporter who over the weekend assassinated one of the most prominent Democratic state legislators in Minnesota and attempted to kill another. Boelter prepared a list of dozens of people he wanted to target, including Democratic Party politicians and abortion providers. It seems he may also have planned to target the No Kings Day protests that took place on Saturday.

This is obviously a very dangerous moment for the United States. It’s a stress test which allows us to see how the political system reacts to this ratcheting up of violence. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

It’s worth remembering that even though right wing violence has been by far the dominant form of terrorism in the United States throughout its entire history, Republicans and conservatives have an equally long history of claiming that it does not exist, or that it is justified.

The Jim Crow South was kept afloat not just by official regimes of repression, but also by private lynchings and violence by non-state groups like the KKK. Such violence was encouraged - and granted impunity - by the official regime, but the fact it was technically private individuals committing the acts gave the regime a veneer of plausible deniability.

You can draw a straight line from those lynchings to the insurrection of January 6th: a violent attack by private individuals on the democratic process and the rights of the insurrectionists’ fellow citizens, encouraged by the official authorities in the form of Donald Trump. Now Trump has pardoned everyone who took part in that shameful day, giving his stamp of approval to their actions in retrospect.

Between Jim Crow and January 6th, there were some missed opportunities to admit that this problem existed and stare it in the face. One was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when far-right terrorist Timothy McVeigh carried out the most serious act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Another was shortly after the election of Barack Obama, when militia activity began to surge and the Department of Homeland Security tried to pivot to tackling it. In both cases, Republicans raised holy hell and blocked any serious reckoning with the problem.

And now there is a president who has frequently encouraged or made light of precisely this sort of violence.