For they sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; It yields no grain. Should it yield, strangers would swallow it up.
Hosea 8:7
The first part of this verse came to my mind rather quickly as it became clear that what happened at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday was a failed assassination attempt. It needs to be said that Trump and his allies have flooded our politics with both rhetorical and real violence for many years. Because memories and attention spans among regular citizens (and unfortunately journalists too) are quite short, it is important to push back against the continuing attempts of those on the political right to cast themselves as victims.
This ABC News piece from May 2020 catalogued no less than 54 criminal cases where those who threatened and/or perpetrated violence against people used Trump as their rationale for it, or used his name in their threats. A post I wrote 2 1/2 years ago drew connections between the January 6th insurrection and our response to the 9/11 attacks, but Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that day certainly incited the violence and deaths that would happen later. On June 16, 2015, Trump said the now-infamous, xenophobic words about who Mexico was sending. While looking for the source material for this, I came across the abstract of an undergraduate honors thesis exploring the impact of Trump’s presidency on Latinx teens which cited those same words. These examples barely even scratch the surface of how far Trump’s particularly malign influence has spread. As Trump’s legal troubles have grown (along with those of January 6th insurrectionists), threats against judges and their families have spiked to exceedingly high levels.
North Carolina lieutenant governor and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is one of the better and most recent examples of a politician Trump has endorsed who traffics in the same rhetorical violence he does. Robinson reportedly said the following from the pulpit of The Lake Church on June 30:
“Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”
NC Newsline story by Rob Schofield, published July 5, 2024
An even more grim example of the endorsement of violence far too common among candidates and elected officials in the GOP comes from Texas governor Greg Abbott. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry for the murder of Garrett Foster, a U.S. Air Force veteran participating in a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality. Despite evidence that Perry planned to murder a protestor, despite a jury finding Perry guilty on the basis of that and other evidence, and despite being sentenced to 25 years for his crime, he served barely a year in prison before receiving a full pardon from the governor. The pardon will restore Perry’s right to own and use firearms. Perry is a US Army veteran who the Army removed from its ranks via a dishonorable discharge after his murder conviction.
In the years after Black Lives Matters protests spread worldwide in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, Republican legislators have sponsored and even successfully enacted into law, measures protecting drivers who injure or kill protestors with their vehicles. Jack Galle is a Louisiana Republican who recently sponsored legislation to limit the liability of drivers if they harm people illegally blocking a road or highway. Kevin Stitt, the GOP governor of Oklahoma, signed legislation in 2021 granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally injure or kill protestors. The same legislation makes penalties against demonstrators who block public roads more severe. Below is a reminder of what these GOP lawmakers are endorsing:
The picture above was taken by Ryan Kelly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it. In 2017, a man deliberately drove his Dodge Charger into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA. He murdered Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. These are the protests of which then-President Trump said “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” What precipitated the rally and the counterprotests was the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on horseback from a park that formerly bore his name. It was the latest in the series of removals of Confederate monuments and memorials that began in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at the Charleston, SC church affectionately known as Mother Emanuel by yet another white supremacist.
Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric against Mexicans could certainly have been taken as encouragement by the mass shooter who murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Beyond the recent state-endorsed anti-migrant measures of questionable legality, such as buoys on the Rio Grande with razors and razor wire strung across private property without the permission of landowners, Texas and Arizona have decades-long histories of vigilantes operating at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to impersonate government agents, to hunt, detain, and even kill migrants. Trump’s xenophobia (and that of the political far right more broadly) should also be considered in connection with his championing of birtherism conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. Trump predictably turned to the birtherism playbook again to undermine Nikki Haley’s candidacy.
The ABC News piece I linked earlier makes plain the common threads between the perpetrators of Trump-inspired violence and the victims of it this way:
The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 54 cases are mostly white men–as young as teenagers and as old as 75–while the victims largely represent an array of minority groups–African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and gay men.
ABC News story written by Mike Levine, May 30, 2020
Both in this country’s history and in its present, the venom of violent rhetoric far more often than not infects those who go on to enact real violence against others. Black folks in particular, as well as their allies, have often been at the receiving end of political violence and terrorism. Often that violence has been aided and abetted by law enforcement, from the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, to the Orangeburg Massacre, and many lynchings, bombings, and other acts of terrorism in between. Trump has joined Alabama Governor George C. Wallace in a rare example of a political figure reaping a small measure of the violent rhetoric he has sown for many years.
In the wake of violence turning on someone who stoked such rhetoric for years, we are predictably hearing calls to turn down heated rhetoric from anti-woke publications like The Free Press, from House speaker Mike Johnson (who could be found earlier this spring spreading disinformation re: students protesting the war in Gaza and arguably inciting violence against protestors), and others in the GOP. When it comes to the political right however, we are talking about the same group of people responsible for what you see below:
Democratic elected officials condemning the violence and wishing Trump a full recovery were easy to find, including President Biden, former president Obama, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Former speaker Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked by a man with a hammer by a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory (which Trump has embraced and amplified for years). It is very easy to find video of Trump telling jokes about Paul Pelosi being assaulted, and his audience laughing along with him.
Others can and will draw false equivalences between political violence from the ideological left and right. I won’t waste time doing that. The political registration of the would-be assassin (Republican) and his $15 financial donation (Democrat) are far less relevant than his easy access to a dangerous weapon (courtesy of his father) and reports that he was bullied as a child. We have seen incels with guns engage in mass shootings before, with women as their primary victims. It should be noted that both the increasingly broad availability guns, and in the places they can be carried, and in laws that reduce or eliminate the liability of those who shoot and kill others if they claim self-defense are largely championed by the GOP.
Not only is the predominant source of the threat of political violence and terrorism abundantly clear, that has been the case for years. The GOP has actively opposed efforts to give the federal government tools to combat domestic terrorism going back to the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. The GOP destroyed the careers of those in the DHS who warned of an increase in right-wing extremism in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. The GOP’s deliberate destruction of the federal government’s ability to provide intelligence and act as a resource for local law enforcement led directly to Charlottesville PD having no federal support with which to counter the white supremacist and neo-Nazi elements that descended on their city in 2017, and to the Oath Keepers being able to grow unchecked into a group whose members would man a stack formation which would ultimately breach the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection.
It should go without saying that political violence is bad for the United States. Even a small country like Jamaica has been beset by political violence for decades. Political violence ought to be condemned, and I add my small voice to the chorus who condemn it today in good faith. But we ought not accept unchallenged such calls to turn down heated rhetoric from the very same people who turned the rhetorical temperature up in the first place. We can and should condemn political violence at the same time we call out hypocrisy.