The January 6th Violence Didn’t Start On January 6th.
If anyone out there still thinks that Donald Trump has the slightest chance of having any more influence over how the GOP goes about getting ready for the next election cycle, I invite you to watch the video that the Democrats posted at the beginning of yesterday’s Senate impeachment event. How many times did someone carrying a Trump campaign flag commit an illegal and/or violent act?
In that regard, I only hope that one of the Democratic witnesses over the next couple of days goes beyond the specific charge of how Trump incited the Capitol riot on January 6th and explains how and why all those rioters showed up at the Ellipse in the first place. Because if you think that Trump only began advocating violence as a political narrative on January 6th, you haven’t been paying attention for the last five years.
Back in January, 2016 Trump told an audience in Sioux City, IA that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and ‘shoot somebody’ and he wouldn’t lose any votes. In February, he was back in Iowa and told a campaign rally that they should “knock the crap” out of anyone in the audience who was protesting his remarks.
These vulgar appeals to potential voters didn’t stop after Trump won the 2016 campaign. They got worse. Except such comments weren’t being used to rile up a crowd on a campaign stop. Trump’s veneration of using violence to endorse the most hateful, the vilest and, it goes without saying, the dumbest political narrative imaginable became the watchwords of his Presidency.
The President of the United States actually described some of the Nazis marching around Charlottesville with swastikas, Nazi flags, AR-15’s and chanting anti-Semitic slurs out
loud as ‘good people.’ During the first Presidential debate, he refused to condemn White supremacist groups who attacked demonstrators calling for an end to police violence against Blacks, a demonstration of stupidity, crassness and racial animosity which might have cost him the election right then and there.
You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to take one look at the shitheads who stormed into the Capitol on January 6th, to know that these yahoos were only doing what they believed Trump wanted them to do. After all, what’s the difference between someone who reports that the election was fair and square versus a member of the Senate who refuses to stop the Electoral College from certifying the vote?
In his speech on January 6th, he told the crowd that they have to ‘fight.’ He’s been saying the same thing for months, what else is new? And he broadcast it over social media again, and again, and again. His lawyers have argued, and I happen to agree with their claim, that Trump may not have known that the Ellipse crowd was going to take his words literally and therefore he cannot be charged with inciting a riot.
But that’s not the point of this impeachment trial and frankly, I don’t care whether Trump is found guilty or not. The point is this: The President of the United States doesn’t use profanity. He doesn’t refer to any country as a ‘shithole,’ at least not on national TV.
The President of the United States doesn’t offer to pay the legal expenses for someone who is charged with assault after attacking a protestor during a campaign rally.
The President of the United States doesn’t call a media personality an ‘asshole’ on his Twitter feed, he doesn’t routinely refer to people who criticize him as ‘dopes,’ or ‘idiots’ or worse.
Is such behavior tantamount to encouraging violence? It sure is. Because guess what happens when two people disagree, and then the disagreement gets more heated, and then one of them calls the other one a name?
Know what happened after Trump told the Proud Boys to ‘stand down’ and ‘stand by?’ His newly minted SA storm-troopers started selling their t-shirts now emblazoned with the words, ‘stand by.’
As I said above, it doesn’t matter whether Trump is convicted or not. What’s important is that he shuts up and goes away.
