Trump 2024 Makes Rhetorical Embrace of Political Violence Explicit

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 27, 2023

 

Until now, Donald Trump has usually maintained just enough ambiguity in his celebrations of violence as a political instrument to claim that he has never endorsed physical attacks on his opponents. That cunning has largely been dispensed with as the former president embraces the martyrology surrounding the January 6 rioters. Trump’s rally over the weekend in Waco, Texas, showed that the former president has made that violent expression of support for his political fortunes into part of his mythos. And in the process, Trump has abandoned the plausible deniability that once served him so well.

 

In what has to come close to the patriotic equivalent of blasphemy, Trump mocked solemn displays of allegiance to the United States from the stage of his event at Waco’s airport grounds, placing his right hand over his heart amid a multi-media celebration of the January 6 rioters. Over the loudspeakers blared the bizarre single “Justice for All,” a version of the “Star Spangled Banner” sung by incarcerated individuals convicted as a result of their participation in that day’s lawlessness. Behind him, Trump’s campaign team played footage of demonstrators approaching the Capitol Building as it was engulfed by a mob. The message couldn’t have been clearer.

 

From the stage, Trump nursed the same grievances that animated the swarms attacking the Capitol building in their quixotic quest to prevent the certification of 2020’s election results. He described the 2024 election as the “final battle” in his movement’s crusade to avenge that insult, adding that “it’s going to be a big one.” In the days leading up to the Waco rally, he had called on his supporters to register their opposition to his possible indictment by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. His arrest on a “false charge,” he’d insisted, would carry the “potential for death [and] destruction.” “Our country is being destroyed,” he wrote, in an expression of disdain for nonviolent protest, “and they tell us to be peaceful!”

 

Ever since Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, a cottage industry has devoted itself to translating his rather plain exhortations to violence into something that sounds far more anodyne to the ears of MAGA voters. It is doubtlessly true that many — even the vast majority — of Trump-backing Americans hear his bombast and see him celebrating the actions of the criminally violent and rationalize away the menace. But not everyone in earshot of the former president can compartmentalize his provocations. Sometimes, Trump’s supporters hear his calls for violence, behave violently, and experience the ruin of their fortunes as a result. The way is littered with lives shattered by Trump’s flirtations with the Cult of Action.

 

“We’re caught up in political mess today and you and me, we gotta heal our country,” then-79-year-old John McGraw said, his voice breaking, in a courtroom apology to his victim following his conviction for assaulting a Black Lives Matter protester at a 2016 Trump rally. The backdrop against which this attack occurred was the climate Trump cultivated — his demands that his supporters give his opponents a “punch in the face,” his suggestion that protesters deserved to be “roughed up.” The inflammatory rant he delivered at a pre-caucus rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2016:

 

There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise. It won’t be so much ’cause the courts agree with us too.

 

Dozens of January 6 rioters have expressed regret over the roles they played in that day’s violence, and many have expressed feeling something like betrayed or led astray by Trump. They are “ashamed.” They “wish” they had made better choices. They mourn the actions that “have changed my life forever.” In testimony before the January 6 committee, rioter Stephen Ayres confessed that the rioters were only following orders. “Basically, the president, he got everybody riled up, told everybody to head on down, so we basically [were] just following what he said,” Ayres testified. “It changed my life, and not for the good.”

 

Trump himself hasn’t displayed any concern for the wellbeing of those among his supporters whom he has led to the edge of the abyss. Republican lawmakers told journalists that Trump dismissed Kevin McCarthy’s calls for Trump’s intervention on that day by casually asserting that “these people are more upset about the election than you are.” According to the reporting, he has justified the rioters’ chants of support for the lynching of then-vice president Mike Pence by saying that “the people were very angry.” If all this reporting is erroneous, the former president’s conduct hasn’t suggested as much.

 

And yet, until very recently, Trump’s defenders could still mount a facially true defense of his actions by noting that he had mouthed in passing and just under his breath calls for his supporters to remain peaceful. Now, even that fig leaf is gone.

 

Donald Trump is pitching his 2024 campaign as a vehicle for “retribution.” He’s promising to take the fight to the “thugs” in control of America’s justice system. He’s placing those convicted of their roles in the violence that occurred on January 6 on a pedestal. Yet if he cares for them and their families, he doesn’t show it; they are just tools at his disposal.

 

Of course, it is profoundly stupid to make vindicating the January 6 rioters into a campaign-trail theme. The voters who produce electoral majorities did not like what occurred on January 6. They’ve given every indication that they will not support candidates who cannot convincingly ensure them that those events will never happen again. And even beyond these bloodless, rational calculations, Trump’s behavior is grotesquely immoral. Republicans have abandoned the language of morality in response to the political imperatives associated with navigating a movement of which Trump is the head. But what other language is there to describe the willful abuse of impressionable people?

 

Voters are unlikely to endorse a campaign devoted to conditioning the public into believing January 6 wasn’t so bad after all. But the cost of that campaign on the party Trump seeks to lead and the consciences of those drafted into it have implications that extend well beyond November 2024.