How Donald Trump turns a profit on political violence

Donald Trump, like the other autocrats, dictators, and tyrants he admires, will not let a crisis go to waste. Trump takes every opportunity to advance his own needs and interests despite (if not because) how many other people may be hurt in the process. This is both learned and natural behavior for the corrupt ex-president. It is who and what he is; he will never stop.

Trump is the first former or sitting president to be charged and convicted of criminal felonies. Instead of moderating his behavior, Trump became more antisocial. He even went so far as to sell pieces of the suit he wore to court during his New York hush-money trial.

Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania during which he was hit in the ear. Trump would turn that incident into “proof” that he is blessed and chosen by God to be the country’s first dictator and a type of God-king. Trump’s now iconic “Fight! Fight! Fight!” reaction to the shooting turned slogan is emblazed on t-shirts and other paraphernalia sold to MAGA cultists and other devotees. Trump was also immortalized on other items after the attempt on his life, including action figures and “collectibles.”

Forbes magazine describes Trump’s power over the MAGA people in the following way: “In politics, he has developed an enormous group of followers, the most hardcore of whom are more loyal than any of his previous customers, eagerly buying whatever the former president offers, at almost any price he’s willing to sell.”

Last Sunday, Donald Trump was targeted by an assassin who appeared to be lying in wait near his golf resort in Florida. The Secret Service and local law enforcement acted quickly to protect Donald Trump and arrested the would-be assassin. As he did with his first assassination attempt, and any other opportunity that presents itself, Trump and his surrogates almost immediately started sending out fundraising emails and other communications to the MAGA people.

As part of their opportunistic and exploitative nature, Trump, his propagandists and other agents are trafficking in violence and chaos. This is central to Trump’s fascism, demagoguery, political opportunism, and feral politics. Instead of toning down the levels of extreme political tension in the country, Trump and his surrogates have chosen to use this most recent assassination attempt (as they did with the first one) as an opportunity to attack, threaten, and incite “retaliatory” violence against Kamala Harris, President Biden, other leading Democrats and any other people deemed to be the “enemies” of Trump and MAGA.

Moreover, Trump and his propagandists are using the standard fascist and authoritarian strategy of projection and deflection as they blame the Democrats and “the left” for the increasing political violence in the country. The facts show the opposite. It is Donald Trump, the MAGA people, “conservatives” and the larger right-wing who are mostly responsible for serious acts of political violence during the Age of Trump (and in the last few decades as well).

For example, Donald Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly, and incorrectly, described Kamala Harris as being an anti-American “communist”, “socialist,” and a “fascist” who must be stopped at all costs.

During an interview with Fox News, Trump said that the would-be assassin in Florida, “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it…. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

These are just a few examples of a much larger pattern of violence, stochastic terrorism, and other violent and antidemocratic behavior by Trump during the last nine years.

To wit. Donald Trump is continuing to channel Adolph Hitler with his threats and promises to purify the blood of the nation by eliminating the human vermin. The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio is the most recent target of Trump’s eliminationist threats. Trump and other right-wing hatemongers are accusing Haitians of hunting down and eating (white) people’s dogs and cats. This is in addition to spreading diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. These are old white supremacist lies and conspiracy theories that have little to no basis in fact.

JD Vance and other Trump propagandists are now admitting that they are telling lies about the Haitian community in Springfield. This has not stopped them from continuing to spread their racist screeds and rumors. As a direct result, there have been several days of bomb threats and other terrorist menacing against Haitians and other people of color in Springfield.

Unrepentant, during his New York rally on Wednesday, Donald Trump said the following about migrants and “illegal immigrants”:

For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, and I’ve been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let them in, it’s going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country, their people that their countries, who are very smart, they don’t want them. That’s why, all over the world, a lot of people coming from jails, out of the Congo in Africa.

‘Where do you come from?’ ‘The Congo…Where in the Congo?’ ‘We come from jail.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘We will not tell you’”….“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world, Asia, lot of it coming from Asia, and what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot. You will have a safe New York within three months. Three months…..For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, November 5 will be your Liberation Day. It’s going to be liberation because you are living like hell. You’re living a life like hell.

Trump has plans for the largest deportation campaign in American history — what he describes and delights in as being “a bloody story” — when and if he takes power in 2025 and becomes the country’s first dictator.

The mainstream news media (especially the elite agenda-setting news media such as the New York Times) does have occasional moments of clarity where instead of normalizing Trump and his MAGA movement’s aberrant and extremely dangerous behavior they choose to properly sound the alarm about it. For example, during a recent panel discussion on CNN, Tim Naftali, who is a leading historian, told this direct truth about Trumpism and violence –- which was met by protests from a Trump surrogate who tried to blame Democrats as the most responsible for the country’s toxic political environment.

“There’s no place in this country for violence. But let’s be honest about why we have so much tension in this country,” Naftali began. “When you dehumanize people, you are using the rhetoric of the ’30s. I’m not going to say which country in the 30s. But when you dehumanize people, you make it easier for disturbed minds to do the wrong thing….The constitution won’t exist. There will be a bloodbath. He’s going to be a dictator. When you effectively radicalize millions of people into believing that if an electoral outcome doesn’t go our way, they’re no longer going to be living in the country they thought they were, what do you expect to happen?”

In a recent essay, also at CNN, Stephen Collinson continued to warn the American people public about the existential dangers of Trumpism to the country’s democracy and future:

And the connection between a politician’s rhetoric and actions taken by isolated individuals is often hard to pin down even if the fear is always that a small minority of people might be motivated by a leader’s comments to provoke violence.

But Trump’s claims that Biden and Harris bear direct culpability underscore the extreme nature of his own political instincts.

His claim that their warnings about his supposed threat to democracy risk getting him killed is particularly stark. By implication, he’s saying that it is illegitimate for his opponents to point out the truth: that his past behavior — in seeking to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s voting will be corrupt — suggests that he poses a danger to America’s democratic system. His position, which looks like an attempt to stifle free speech, may also be a dark harbinger of how he would behave if he won a second term….

In his interview on “State of the Union,” Vance said that any suggestion that he or Trump had acted in a way that caused such threats was “disgusting.”

It’s also disgusting that anyone would consider assassinating a former president running in a democratic election. Yet the historical record shows that while Trump has become a victim of a toxic political culture, he’s also one of its primary instigators.

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In a frontpage story in the New York Times on Monday, Peter Baker wrote forcefully, and with great insight and candor, about Donald Trump and his unique role in encouraging (and legitimating) political violence:

At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.

While Mr. Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.

Mr. Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words. Just last week, his false pet-eating accusations against Haitian migrants during his debate with Ms. Harris were quickly followed by bomb threats that turned life upside-down in Springfield, Ohio, and he did nothing to discourage them. After 33 bomb threats, Ohio’s governor said Monday that law enforcement would conduct daily sweeps of schools in the town.

Asked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats, he demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

These are outliers. Such moments of pro-democracy journalism and bold truth-telling are, for the most part, inconsistent and quickly retreated from as the mainstream media defautls back to its bad and obsolete habits of false equivalence, “bothsidesism,” “objectivity,” and horserace politics.

In some of the worst examples of media malpractice in the Age of Trump and the democracy crisis, the mainstream news media will platform Trump and his propagandists’ claims that they are the “real victims“ of political violence in America instead of doing the basic work of exposing the lies and distortions of facts and reality such claims are based upon.

In a recent essay, Rick Wilson, who is one of the founding members of the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project, intervenes, as he highlights the absurdity and danger of allowing Trump and his agents to squash dissent by claiming fictive victimhood status:

The emerging MAGA conflation that every criticism of Donald Trump is a call for his assassination is a logical, moral, and political fallacy of the most sublimely stupid nature, a false equivalence so profoundly wrong in every dimension that only the people with a political death wish (and, perhaps, the American media) could buy it.

It is an argument made only by Trump’s most mendacious enablers and propagandists, believed only by fools, and embraced only by the damned and the doomed who would unilaterally disarm in the face of the most dangerous fascist leader to have ever cursed the American body politic.

They say calling Trump what he is — a pendant authoritarian, a convicted criminal, an enabler of the worst and most dangerous elements of our body politic — constitutes a death threat, not a description. Sorry, MAGA, but if the jackboot fits, wear it: he is an authoritarian, a statist, a racist, an aspiring fascist, a hateful, mendacious, corrupt traitor, a fool, mentally ill, and frankly evil.
I’ll spare you the irony of people who grunt about “muh First Amendment rights” when they’re confronted with the rotten sickness of their online cruelty and conspiracy theories, now being the leaders of the most potent assault on political speech and expression in the last hundred years.

With less than 60 days left until Election Day, the mainstream American news media needs to quickly learn and internalize the following rules and realities about Donald Trump, the MAGAfied Republicans, “conservatives,” and the larger right wing and neofascist movement.

They are malign actors who do not believe in American democracy and the country’s democratic traditions, institutions, or culture. They are especially hostile to both the concept and reality of multiracial pluralistic democracy. As malign actors, they will do anything to get and keep power including acts of lethal political violence as seen on Jan. 6.

They routinely engage in political and other behavior that constitutes a “moral hazard.” For example, there is a reason why a person cannot buy fire insurance on their neighbor’s home or take out life insurance on a stranger. Such a person is incentivized to cause harm because it will be financially and personally rewarding – and they are generally safe from the negative consequences of their behavior. In their approach to politics, society, and life more broadly, Donald Trump, the MAGA people, and today’s Republicans and “conservatives” and the larger right-wing are guided by the same unethical principles.

I conclude this essay with the following wisdom, advice, and warning for the mainstream American news media, the responsible political class, and the American people in this moment of democracy crisis and ascendant fascism. In his book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” philosopher Jason Stanley writes:

Joseph Goebbels once declared, ‘This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.’ Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

You have been warned again. It is your choice to listen and act accordingly or to believe that denial will save you.