A History of Violence
The recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump is dominating headlines, raising questions about the potential for further political violence. There are also questions about the impact of the attempted assassination on the election. I discussed some of those questions on the podcast in a “special episode” I recorded with Producer Doug and Evelyn Lopez. In the interest of not repeating myself, both here and there, I invite you to give it a listen.
That said, there’s a few things I’d add that didn’t make it or fit into that conversation.
First, we are in the midst of a concerted effort to rehabilitate Donald Trump and frame him as a unifying or conciliatory figure. This is magical thinking and doesn’t match the public record. Attorney Sherrilyn Ifill nailed this point earlier this week: “All signs point to the likelihood that we are about to experience a week of the greatest gaslighting rebrand since The Lost Cause.” He’s being painted by some as a victim of the rhetoric against him. If you allow them, Congressional Republicans will have you believing this twenty year-old, suburban, Republican shooter was inspired by a Matthew Yglesias column or the NPR Politics Podcast.
It’s important that people believe their eyes and know their history. Through his bellicose rhetoric and authoritarian spasms, Donald Trump has done more to coarsen our politics than any figure since George Wallace. He may be a victim of violence in this case but throughout his presidency he was a conduit and avid cheerleader for violence against his foes.
He encouraged police to be more violent with people they arrest in a 2017 speech at Suffolk Community College. He supported Montana politician Greg Gianforte saying “he’s my guy” following his assault on Ben Jacobs, a reporter from The Guardian, in 2018. He called for protesters outside the Whitehouse to be shot in 2020. He praised police for their extrajudicial killing of activist Michael Forest Reinoehl, saying “there has to be retribution.” The video below provides more examples of him inciting crowds to assault protesters shouting “throw them out” and “knock the hell out of them.”
Secondly, the media discourse about the place of violence in our politics is grounded in historical ignorance. Rather than being a departure from our “placid norm,” violence is an ugly recurring guest star in US politics:
Four US Presidents have been assassinated: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy.
Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt were shot and survived.
Gerald Ford faced two assassination attempts, seventeen days apart, one planned by the Manson Family.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,075 Black Americans were killed by white mobs in lynchings between 1877 and 1950.
Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton Jr. were all murdered in a six-year span from 1963 to 1969.
There were over 2500 bombings in the US in an eighteen month period in 1971 to 1972, according to data from the FBI.
Sixty people were killed in the 1898 white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina.
An estimated 300 people were murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the attack on Black Wall Street in 1921.
White-supremacist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, many of them women and children when he detonated a Ryder truck outside the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
I could go on for weeks.
A country that chose to ensconce a right-to-bear-arms in its founding documents, averaged a lynching a week for much of its history, and is the setting from roughly 115,000 annual shootings, doesn’t get to throw its hands up in disbelief in times like this.
We are uniquely violent among similarly wealthy democracies. This isn’t a departure from who we are—this is who we are and how the world sees us. And the former President has been one of the leading enablers of that violence.
Don’t let him or anyone else convince you otherwise.
I’ll be back in the next newsletter with some thoughts about algorithmic everything.
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