Trump
Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence
The
Republican Party must counteract lies rather than indulge them.
6:00 AM ET
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
At
the beginning of last week, former President Donald Trump referred to the 2020 election as the
“greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country.” By the end of the
week, he had issued a statement saying, “As our Country
is being destroyed, both inside and out, the Presidential Election of 2020 will
go down as THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”
What else is new? These are the ravings of a 74-year-old
sociopath, isolated and banned from social media, living in Mar-a-Lago, where
he is crashing wedding parties and delivering
rambling monologues.
Or at least, that would be the right way to look at things,
if not for the fact that the GOP remains fully in Trump’s thrall, with its
leadership more committed than ever to spreading his foundational lies and
conspiracy theories. Under Trump’s sway, the Republican Party is becoming more
fanatical, venturing even further into a world of illusion.
Trump’s grip on the Republican Party was on display once again last week, when Representative Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership post as conference chair. Her fireable offense? Refusing to remain silent in the face of Trump’s ongoing efforts to undermine our constitutional system. She wants to “relitigate the past,” it’s said, despite the fact that it is Trump, not Cheney, who is obsessing over the 2020 election.
No former president, and certainly no president defeated
after only one term, has so dominated his party after he left office. So
Trump’s words matter. They mattered in the lead-up to, and on the day of, the
deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6. They still matter. And if the
Republican Party doesn’t counteract these lies rather than indulge them,
political violence will become more acceptable and more prevalent on the
American right.
This
assessment isn’t based on mere speculation; we know that many of
the people who participated in the violent assault on the Capitol believed that
they were acting patriotically, foot soldiers in the 21-century version of the
American Revolution, doing what they understood their leader was asking of
them. As a Washington Post story put
it, “The accounts of people who said they were inspired by the president to
take part in the melee inside the Capitol vividly show the impact of Trump’s months-long attack on the integrity
of the 2020 election and his exhortations to supporters to ‘fight’ the
results.” The Post story points out that a video clip of rioters mobbing the Capitol
steps caught one man screaming at a police officer: “We were invited here! We
were invited by the president of the United States!”
Jill Sanborn, the head of counterterrorism at
the FBI, recently told Congress that “the FBI assesses there
is an elevated threat of violence from domestic violent extremists, and some of
these actors have been emboldened in the aftermath of the breach of the U.S.
Capitol. We expect [that] racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,
anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, and other domestic
violent extremists citing partisan political grievances will very likely pose
the greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021 and likely into 2022.”
Cheney told CNN that several Republican members of Congress
had voted against impeaching Trump out of fear. “If you look at the vote to
impeach, for example, there were members who told me that they were afraid for
their own security—afraid, in some instances, for their lives,” she said. “And that tells you something about where
we are as a country, that members of Congress aren’t able to cast votes, or
feel that they can’t, because of their own security.”
Georgia
Republicans who in the aftermath of the 2020 election would not go along with
Trump’s false claims about election fraud in that state faced death threats,
intimidation, and harassment, according to Gabriel Sterling, a Republican official
in the Georgia secretary of state’s office. The home of Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, was targeted too. This week I
talked with a Republican election official in Arizona, Stephen Richer, who has
spoken out against what he refers to as Trump’s “unhinged” claims about election fraud in Maricopa County. (Richer says
Trump’s claims are “as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”) He told me he has
received death threats and has been forced to take measures to protect his and
his family’s safety. And these examples are hardly unusual.
While the threat of domestic terrorism is growing, a recent survey by the American Enterprise Institute found
that 39 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect
America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent
actions.” That result was “a really dramatic finding,” according to Daniel Cox, director of
AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. “I think any
time you have a significant number of the public saying use of force can be
justified in our political system, that’s pretty scary.”
Cox added this important qualifier: “We shouldn’t run out
and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, 40 percent of Republicans are going to attack the
Capitol.’ But under the right circumstances, if you have this worldview, then
you are more inclined to act in a certain way if you are presented with that
option.”
That the Republican Party’s most reliable constituency,
white evangelicals, is embracing QAnon conspiracy theories at depressingly high
numbers hasn’t helped matters. More than a quarter say it was “mostly” or
“completely” accurate to say that Trump “has been secretly fighting a group of
child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.”
That share is higher than for any other faith group, NPR points out—and more than double the support
for QAnon beliefs evident among Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and
non-Christians.
“As with a lot of questions in the survey, white
evangelicals stand out in terms of their belief in conspiracy theories and the
idea that violence can be necessary,” Cox said. “They’re far more likely to
embrace all these different conspiracies.”
This is all kindling for a future conflagration, with more
sticks and twigs added to the pile with every passing week.
One example: During a House Oversight and Reform Committee
hearing last Wednesday that was focused on the January 6 insurrection, several
Republicans attempted to rewrite the history of the riots. Representative
Andrew Clyde of Georgia described the lethal assault as appearing
like a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol. Another Georgia Republican,
Representative Jody Hice, said, “It was Trump supporters who lost their lives
that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others.” And
Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona accused the Justice Department of
“harassing peaceful patriots across the country,” adding, “Outright propaganda
and lies are being used to unleash the national security state against
law-abiding U.S. citizens, especially Trump voters.”
We’re seeing Republicans who initially reacted with horror
to the riot now making their peace with it, and with the conspiracy theories
that led up to it.
But
here’s where things really get dangerous. The repetition of the lies not only
causes tens of millions of Americans to embrace them; over time, it deforms
their moral sensibility. It creates an inversion of ethics, what in philosophy
is known as the “transvaluation of values,” in which lies become truth and unjust
acts are seen as righteous. Believing the deceptions also becomes a form of
virtue signaling, a validation of one’s loyalty to others in one’s political
tribe. In this case, of course, what we’re dealing with is not just any lie;
it’s a particularly destructive one, among the most dangerous a democracy can
face. It erodes confidence in our elections, the rule of law, and our system of
government.
The mindset that this gives rise to in MAGA world is
something like this: We are victims of a monstrous injustice. Our
revered leader, Donald Trump, was removed from office by illegitimate means. It
was done by those who are determined to destroy us, and to destroy our country;
they cheated their way to power. Nothing like this has ever happened before in
American history, and we must employ every available weapon at our disposal to
undo this historic abuse of power, this coordinated assault on our rights. If
others won’t protect us, we will take matters into our own hands. We would
prefer it not to be violent, but sometimes violence is a necessary recourse,
and we are in uncharted territory. We will do what we must. After all, we are
victims of “THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.”
This is how the road to political violence is paved.
Trump himself, during his remarks before and on January 6,
understood that he did not need to explicitly call for violence in order to
provoke violence. If his supporters accepted the arguments he made at face
value, violence became, in their minds at least, the only patriotic response.
A few of us who were lifelong Republicans—and many who were
not—warned where all this would lead. More than five years ago, I pointed to the
danger of “Trump’s linkage of violence, passion, anger and love of country,”
adding, “His political practices are precisely what the founders feared and
Lincoln warned against.” The day after his inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a
volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going
to end well.” And it didn’t.
The trajectory of events was pretty clear then; it’s pretty
clear now. The seeds that produced an armed attack against the citadel of
democracy were planted years ago; they are now being tended to by MAGA true
believers, by cynical and timorous Republican lawmakers, and by propagandists
in the right-wing media ecosystem. The violence we have seen is likely a
preview of coming attractions. Hear me, Republicans, when I say that many on
the American right are growing more and more comfortable with violence as an
instrument of politics, as a means to achieve their goals, as a way to defeat
their perceived enemies. The warning signs are all there. For the sake of their
own integrity and for the good of the country, Republicans who know better—and
a lot do—need to speak out, resist the manipulation, stop living within the
lie.
In
his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in
Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln cautioned that the nation’s “proud
fabric of freedom” was endangered by social disorder and especially by mob
violence. He spoke about “something of ill-omen amongst us. I mean the
increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing
disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober
judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers
of justice.”
In describing what could deliver a crushing blow to the
United States, the man who would eventually become America’s greatest president
and its greatest Republican dismissed the threat of foreign powers.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be
expected?” the 28-year-old Lincoln asked. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it
must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our
lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we
must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Things can change; parties, like individuals, can repair and
reform and, in doing so, promote the common good. Admirable figures can rise
from the ranks; we’ve seen that with Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Adam
Kinzinger. But they are lonely and isolated. For now, and for those of us who
have spent much of our political life in the Republican Party—who knew it was
hardly flawless but who did believe in its promise and core principles—it’s
painful to acknowledge that the party that Lincoln helped build now embodies
the very dangers that Lincoln warned about.
PETER WEHNER is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political,
cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author
of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.