File Photo By Chase Hunter/Cronkite News: Crowds pack Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington D.C. in November 2020 at the start of a march in support of embattled former President Donald Trump.
Column By John Young
It was the last time, in the face of politically inspired violence, Donald Trump acted like a president.
June of 2017: Republican Rep. Steve Scalise had been wounded by a gunman who targeted those practicing for the annual congressional softball game.
“We may have our differences,” Trump said in a statement, “but we do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation’s capital is here because, above all, they love our country.”
Amen.
Ah, but it was an act.
So many opportunities to say the right thing after that. Trump still can’t muster an ounce of outrage over violence that supports his political cause.
Scalise survived his wounds. Capitol Officer Brian Sicknick did not. He died after pummeling by Jan. 6 rioters to whom Trump blew a video kiss: “We love you.” Today they’re “hostages” and “patriots.”
Trump almost sprained his face trying to perform a plausible frown after Heather Heyer died under the wheels of a white supremacist’s vehicle at a Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” tiki torch rally.
So much violence, so many threats, in the name of a dangerous man.
Trump never offers a calming word amid it all; instead, just the opposite: He intimates that if he doesn’t get his way in this courtroom or on Election Day, there will be unrest, even violence.
Hearing the father of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis describe the threats that caused her to relocate from her home, one is reminded that threats of violence are only a degree separated from the real thing, that threats are abuse in a vile class of their own.
Hear the same from Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the Georgia election workers slandered by Rudy Giuliani and terrorized by Trump supporters. What did they do but, as Trump said of fellow partisan Scalise, serve the nation because, “above all, they love our country.”
We’ll never hear a “Please, cool it” from a leader whose acolytes also viciously threaten Republican members of Congress who vote their consciences and defy Trump.
A host of Republicans have left that body, with more to depart in the face of threats from Trump supporters. “I have to worry about my family,” they say. Call it extortion.
For Colorado Republican Ken Buck, the last straw might have been a landlord’s yanking the lease on his office because he didn’t always toe the Trump line.
Donald Trump likes to toss out ridiculous analogies to glorify himself, like comparing himself to Alexei Navalny.
Others can play that game. My offering is much more in tune with reality: MAGA is the 21st-century Ku Klux Klan.
We don’t see the same night-riding violence, but we see enough bullying to make it a trend.
After a 21-year-old Trump supporter opened fire on Latino shoppers in El Paso in 2020, Trump said his inflammatory rhetoric could not be blamed for such things. But ABC News proceeded to find 54 instances close to that comment in which Trump’s name was invoked in “violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.”
Never a word did he say about any of it. He never accepted responsibility.
Lest it be forgotten: The Klan was driven not just by hatred and racism but by the most warped notion of Christianity imaginable.
A kindred force to the Klan, as with the American Nazi movement, was the perverse and dangerous Christian nationalist movement on the rise again today.
Similarly aligned in the years leading up to World War II was the rise of fascism, documented in Rachel Maddow’s best-seller “Prequel.”
One wonders how Madison Square Garden could have been packed to the rafters with these sorts of people for an “America First” rally in 1941.
Somehow, word spreads, just as hatred does.
Today, social media facilitates such communion from the loathsome secrecy of a few hundred thousand sofas.
There, one can warble a “Hosannah” to threatening words about people of alien ethnicities and creeds contaminating America’s blood. They can discuss ways to pursue purity.
The problem back in the ‘30s was that the movement didn’t have just the right leader to make it all happen.
A leader. A leader. Who might that leader be?
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
