Trump Is Celebrating Violence and Nationalism at His Rallies
Republicans aren’t pushing back.
On Monday night, President Trump declared himself a nationalist. At a rally in Houston, he distinguished nationalists from “globalists,” people who, according to Trump, care more about the world than about their own tribe. Nationalism has a fascist pedigree, and Trump has a history of using race, religion, and ethnicity to turn the people he sees as real Americans—people who look like him—against those who have “Arab” or “Mexican heritage.” But violent nationalism, the kind that devoured Europe a century ago, couldn’t happen in America today, could it? A president wouldn’t encourage criminal violence against innocent people. If he did, his party wouldn’t stand for it.
Actually, it would. Trump has been testing the GOP’s tolerance for demagoguery that explicitly promotes brutality. And so far, Republicans seem willing to go along.
No comment. To build support for political violence, you need potential adversaries within your party to clam up or look the other way. Trump is getting that from the GOP. CNBC says it asked Republican lawmakers, “including every Republican senator,” for reactions to the president’s comments. The network got no replies.
It’s not news. Americans are becoming accustomed to Trump’s erosion of norms. Their indifference, in turn, has numbed Trump’s former critics.
Nobody got hurt this time. “Not one person harassed the numerous media reporters who were present,” Scalise said of the Montana rally. That argument glosses over the rally attendee who made a throat-slitting gesture at a CNN correspondent. It ignores the many rallies at which Trump’s followers have harassed reporters. It also ignores the assault on Jacobs. And that’s the point: to deflect attention.
It’s fun. Scalise says Trump was just “ribbing” Gianforte. Sasse says many people see Trump’s rhetoric as “playful.” Eric Trump, the president’s son, says his dad was just having “fun.”
When Republicans call this incident “fun,” they’re not talking about joking at the perpetrator’s expense. They’re talking about joking at the victim’s expense.
It’s politically incorrect. “This is exactly why my father won: because so many people are so sick and tired of … the perfectly scripted politician,” Eric Trump argued during an interview on Fox News. What voters like about President Trump, said Eric, is that “he is un-PC,” willing to “joke about” the body slam. This is what Sen. Marco Rubio meant two years ago when he observed that Trump’s assault on political correctness was an assault on correctness. Taking assault seriously is PC. Therefore, in the upside-down ethos of defying PC, praising the assailant and making light of the assault is virtuous.
It’s strong. Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican political strategist, says the president’s praise of the attack on Jacobs shows “Trump is all about strength. In an uncertain world where everything is falling apart, where people don’t know what to believe in, where everything is uncertain, you want someone to hold it together.”
A president can call himself a nationalist without hurting people. But if he also seeks to divide people by race, ethnicity, and religion, his nationalism becomes insidious. If he endorses violence, he puts people’s lives in danger. And if his party falls in line behind him, the ingredients for a catastrophe are in place.
A day after Trump celebrated Gianforte’s assault on Jacobs, a Republican official in Montana called in to a radio show to say she would have gone further. “If that kid had done to me what he did to Greg, I would have shot him,” she said.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018...cQlbkYiQ115FDZA
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