To beat MAGA violence, Democrats must warn the public about it as much as possible
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This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
As Donald Trump and his allies attempt to transform the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk into a literal casus belli against their political opposition, based on blatant lies about Democratic incitement of left-wing violence, their efforts cannot overcome one basic fact: Starting with his first campaign for the presidency, and continuing through the present day, Donald Trump has done more to promote political violence than any other American of our era.
What seemed shocking a decade ago can feel almost quaint today: Trump’s encouragement of rally-goers to boo and threaten reporters, and to beat up protestors along with the promise to pay the legal bills of those who did so (he also said he’d personally like to punch a protestor in the face); his declaration that he would bring back waterboarding torture; his statement that there would be riots if he did not receive the presidential nomination.
And as his first term unfolded, the dark thread of violence remained for those with eyes to see it, as he urged police to abuse suspects in custody, pressed for border measures that would wound and maim desperate immigrants, and refused to condemn the far-right freaks whose descent on Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 resulted in the death of a counter-protestor. But these tendencies truly began to shine as his presidency foundered in the time of covid, economic slowdown, and the George Floyd protests. After tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” Trump gave shout-outs of support to those protesting anti-covid measures in that state, some of whom were armed; a subset of such opponents went on to plan a foiled kidnapping and possible murder of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. He responded to overwhelmingly peaceful civil rights protests by tweeting “When the shooting starts, the looting starts,” and indeed sought to order Defense Department officials to order troops to shoot protestors. At a debate with Joe Biden, when given the opportunity to denounce right-wing militias, he instead told the fascistic Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
But the events of January 6, 2021 in particular should have forever wiped away any doubts that Donald Trump was a thug unfit for the presidency, and for whom political violence was a key tool to foil democracy. Unwilling to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and deeply fearful of prosecution for the many crimes he had committed in office, he engaged in a months-long insurrection against the United States by attempting to subvert the election results through a variety of illegal maneuvers. When that effort failed, he turned to armed insurrection, inciting a mob of supporters that included paramilitaries, white Christian nationalists, and devoted followers to storm the Capitol building, in a last-ditch effort to halt the certification of the election results. For hours, Trump watched the violence he had incited unfold, as he sat in front of a television and refused to order a defense of the republic. Violence was his final card to play, and he played it to the hilt, until he finally grasped that it would not succeed.
In the subsequent four years, exiled from the presidency, Trump — and, increasingly, the far-right MAGA movement that provides the fount of his political strength — decided that the problem with his first presidency and his defeated insurrection was not that he had erred by embracing threat and violence, but that he had not done so nearly vigorously enough. And so he and his allies set out to transform public memory of the January 6 insurrection, from an act of treason and violent rebellion into a day of righteous cleansing in which no crimes were committed by his supporters. The violence was good, the violence was justified, and the violence was a down payment on more to come should anyone again dare stand against MAGA’s path to power. Rather than renouncing or apologizing for his offenses, Donald Trump doubled down on threat and violence, as did the vast bulk of Republican elected officials through their active endorsement or silent complicity. The few prominent Republicans who worked to hold him accountable for his crimes, such as Representative Cheney, were drummed out of the GOP.
To pave their way back to the White House, Trump and his allies combined white supremacism and incitements of violence into one neat package. They did so by promoting the Great Replacement theory, a far-right delusion that holds that millions of dark-skinned immigrants are being funneled into the U.S. by liberal baddies in order to literally replace good, white Americans with pliable, un-American foreigners. Vastly exaggerating the number of undocumented immigrants crossing our southern border, Trump and others spoke of a literal “invasion” of the United States. They framed the flow of poor Central and South Americans across our border as an actual army seeking to displace American citizens, seeking to transform ordinary, desperate people into actual enemies of the United States — enemies who merited the most extreme measures in response. This hideous lie also allowed them to incite anger at, and invite extreme measures against, the Democratic Party, as they claimed that Democrats only ever won elections through the ruthless use of undocumented, illegal voters. This tied into another overarching claim that required the an extreme response — that a deranged “far left” was trying to destroy America and replace it with an unrecognizable archipelago of gay bars, trans conversion centers, unspeakable displays of Black Power retribution against white Americans, and godless Wiccanism from Wenatchee to Wichita.
And so, in the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump openly ran to be a strongman president who would subdue America’s internal enemies by force. Violence would be the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial power over the American government and people, and for MAGA’s quest to role back a century or more of racial, gender, and economic progress. Advisors like Stephen Miller dreamed of plans to deploy ICE to round up millions of undocumented immigrants, to occupy liberal sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate, and to unleash the military on any resulting protests. Tellingly, Trump promised, as one of his very first acts if elected, to free the insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol, despite their lawful convictions and the threat that such violent-minded, unrepentant Trump loyalists would pose to American society. Also tellingly, Donald Trump refused to say that he would accept the election results were he to lose, suggesting that a defeat could only be due to an election stolen by treasonous Democrats, and raising the specter of armed rebellion that would dwarf the events of January 6. Trump even spoke about being a dictator “for a day.”
With his calamitous re-election and subsequent inauguration, even close observers might be forgiven for temporarily losing the theme of violent intent. As Elon Musk rampaged through the federal bureaucracy, the assault on the nation was wild, yet relatively peaceable, with illegal mass firings and spending cuts inflicting damage that could feel abstract and theoretical — even as these maneuvers threatened millions of lives and livelihoods. The violence remained, for a short while, symbolic and latent.
But as the first few months passed, a far more ominous phase of his presidency began. ICE agents started aggressive sweeps of undocumented workers, employing violent tactics against unarmed targets; soon, the vast majority masked their faces, in order to obscure their identity, and thus potential accountability for their excesses. All of this was the logical, predictable outcome of a GOP that had for years spoken of an actual invasion of our country: if American were truly occupied by invaders
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