Donald Trump’s attempt to rationalize the “Hang Mike Pence!” chant that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be almost amusing if it weren’t so grotesque.
“The people were very angry,” Trump told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Karl had raised the question of Pence’s safety that day and mentioned the chant, prompting Trump to offer an extended riff about how it was “common sense” that Pence should have taken action in a half-baked effort to preserve Trump’s presidency. It’s nakedly self-serving in a by-now familiar way, an effort to cast the calls for execution as a natural offshoot of the crowd’s belief both that the election was stolen (a false belief that Trump bears primary responsibility for stoking) and that Pence could do something about it (same).
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In this case, it’s also the functional equivalent of trying to coax a rock to run a marathon. Karl, like all objective observers, understands very well that the election was neither stolen nor tainted by significant fraud. He knows, too, that Pence’s ability on Jan. 6 to reject electoral votes submitted by states depended on highly dubious legal reasoning and would hardly have been accepted without question by Congress or the courts. Trump was sitting there offering the same nonsensical, self-serving chaff to a prominent journalist that he might offer to attendees at a Mar-a-Lago fashion show or a crowd at a rally — mostly because he has never had the ability to moderate his rhetoric or to evaluate its political utility beyond the question, “How excited do my fans get about this?”
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Consider that there is an ongoing investigation into the events of that day and Trump’s role in them. It’s reasonable to assume that Pence allies will be asked to offer testimony about what occurred; we know that some have been already. Most people in Trump’s position then might therefore simply demur in response to Karl’s question, saying something like, well, that was obviously unacceptable — even if that comment sat alongside the other claims about fraud. But Trump can’t or won’t offer even that small concession.
By itself, this response is galling, even by the sanded-down standards we’ve grown accustomed to. But this rationalization, this shrugging at calls to lynch a public official, exists in a broader context of political violence that is often treated with the same indifference and similar justifications.
There's a spectrum here. Near one end is Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) editing a snippet of anime to show himself as a hero, slaying Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and attacking President Biden. He defended it as “a symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy”; his spokesman waved it off as “a cartoon” in a statement to The Post and suggested that we “relax.”
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Further along sits Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who spends a great deal of her time these days trying to cast those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “political prisoners.” She does still focus on Hill policy debates, sure, as when she railed against Republicans who had voted for the infrastructure bill — the bipartisan infrastructure bill crafted in part by members of her own party — as traitors or neo-socialists. She encouraged her social media followers to call those Republicans to complain, offering their phone numbers in a tweet. At least one, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), subsequently received death threats.
Speaking to The Post afterward, Greene insisted that she did not “condone” the threats. But when our story about the threats against Upton ran, she giddily used it to once again encourage her followers to call Upton and once again shared his phone number.
Near the opposite end sit darker rationalizations of threats and political violence. Included here are things like the effort to cast those who engage in violence or who make threats as simply normal members of the political right. This includes Greene’s rhetoric on the Jan. 6 rioters, and it includes the attempt to cast a Justice Department warning about threats against school officials as an attack on parents broadly. It includes the argument that there was no justification for the shooting of Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to enter an area of the Capitol on Jan. 6 where legislators were being evacuated.
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It includes Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance declaring on Twitter that the trial of teenager Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting and killing two people during unrest in Wisconsin last year was a function of “a lawless thug prosecutor” trying to “destroy” Rittenhouse’s life.
“We let the wolves set fire to their communities,” Vance said of the Rittenhouse situation. “And when human nature tells them to go and defend what no one else is defending, we bring the full weight of the state and the global monopolists against them.”
Rittenhouse was not a resident of Kenosha, where the protests were underway, and, after firing his weapon, he sought protection from nearby police officers. The “wolves” were people committing vandalism after protests over the police shooting of a Black man.
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Given all of this, if you were to choose to commit an act of violence against an elected official in the name of opposing socialism (supporting spending on infrastructure) or stopping voter fraud (which plays no meaningful role in election outcomes), what might you expect the response to be? It is not uncommon for Rittenhouse to be cast as a hero in right-wing media, largely because he was in Kenosha as an oppositional force to the rioting “wolves” who have been intertwined with the political left. Babbitt, rioting explicitly in support of Trump, has often been lionized.
Last week, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released the results of polling showing that nearly 1 in 5 Americans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Among Republicans, the figure was 3 in 10. Among those who thought the 2020 election was stolen, the figure was nearly 4 in 10.
Gosar’s cartoon was a cartoon, sure, but one that cast political disputes as physical ones. Greene was simply encouraging people to complain to Fred Upton, she argues, but when the nature of those complaints emerged, she simply pushed them further. Vance is just criticizing a legal process — by dehumanizing his perceived opponents and rationalizing vigilantism. And, of course, Trump is doing nothing more than calmly explaining why someone who had been lied to about the election might then think that Pence deserved a death sentence.
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There are two threads that tie these things together. One is the indifference to the escalation of threats and violence. The other is that the wage of that indifference is attention. Gosar likes being the based, ultra-online hero of the right. Greene’s political shtick is entirely caught up in sitting at the fringe. Vance is in an extreme-off against Josh Mandel for the Republican nomination in Ohio. And Trump is Trump, always prioritizing applause and approval from his base.
The costs lie elsewhere.