Josh Marshall: Someone Will Die
Go read the entire thing.
Today we appear to be going further and further into uncharted territory. After the cancellation of Trump’s event yesterday in Chicago, we had the incident at the rally in Dayton, Ohio in which a protestor, Thomas Dimassimo, jumped the security perimeter surrounding Trump and tried to rush the speaking platform. Dimassimo was charged with disorderly conduct and inducing panic and later released on bail. At a subsequent event and on Twitter, Trump claimed that Dimassimo was tied to ISIS, apparently on the basis of a hoax video his staff found on Youtube. At yet another event this evening Trump called for the mass arrest of protestors, noting that arrest records would leave an “arrest mark” and “ruin the rest of their lives.” Trump also repeatedly blamed “communist” Bernie Sanders for what now appear to be the almost constant protests and disruptions at his rallies.
Dimassimo shocked me for the same reason he shocked Josh Marshall. “This is not only totally unacceptable behavior, it is also totally unhinged behavior. When you try to rush the stage when a presidential candidate with Secret Service protection is speaking, you are literally taking your life in your hands.”
He speaks about the climate:
Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I’m not sure we know. And as I’ll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn’t necessarily matter.
It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.
Josh Marshall isn’t given to hyperbole. He’s correct. This is a perfect storm scenario.
What we have seen over the last two weeks isn’t just an escalation of chaos and low level violence but a progressive normalization of unacceptable behavior – more racist verbal attacks, more violence. This is in turn clearly attracting more people who want trouble – on both sides. If you’re an angry racist who wants to act out on his anger, can you imagine any better place to go than a Trump rally? If you hate Trump, his supporters and all he stands for and want to get physical about it, where best to go?
Again, this is not meant to equate the two sides. As I mentioned yesterday, Trump has repeatedly claimed that instances of crowd violence at his rallies occurred when protestors – “bad dudes” – attacked his supporters and his supporters fought back. Until the events last night in Chicago, there is no evidence that anything like this ever happened. Not once. It is all lies.
He definitely isn’t arguing “both sides do it.” He’s saying that the climate Trump is creating will bring out the lone wolf “crazies” from all sides. No rational person is justifying Dimassimo’s actions. His behavior was unhinged, but it fit right in with the climate Trump has created. I fear we can expect more of this.
The climate Trump is creating at his events is one that not only disinhibits people who normally act within acceptable societal norms. He is drawing in, like moths to a flame, those who most want to act out on their animosities, drives and beliefs. It is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.
Unless something happens to knock us off this course, it is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.
Don’t believe me, then consider Trump’s words today:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sunday that he has instructed his team to look into paying the legal fees of the man who sucker punched a black protester.
Trump said he doesn’t condone violence.
“But I want to see. The man got carried away, he was 78 years old, he obviously loves his country, and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country,” Trump said.
That’s not only encouraging this sort of behavior, it’s inciting it… complete with a get out of jail free card and a pat on the back for a job well done. Because something has to be done, right? If you love your country and don’t like seeing what’s happening to it then you have to do something, right? Scary times.
Tags: Donald Trump, racism, sexism, Violence
Meanwhile the media is longing to settle down into a “both sides do it” narrative, but they don’t have any video for that yet.
Maybe if the guy didn’t flick off the audience first he wouldn’t have been punched by the 80-year-old (which I’m sure hurt so bad). Imagine Rev. Al Sharpton was holding a black lives matter rally and a white person came and gave a middle finger to the crowd, calling them racist, and saying “white lives matter/white power”, after constant interrupting every time the Rev. would speak. Then some black senior citizen punched him, I’m sure that Mr. Sharpton, everyone at the rally, and the media would blame the senior citizen and not the protester silencing Mr. Sharpton’s right to peacefully assemble with free speech. Give me a break
Yeah, your side is more inclined towards Dylann Roof and Robert Dear (I could name many more) behavior.
And you act like Dem politicians don’t tell crowds to settle down, which is complete BS. Sharpton, since you use him as an example, went out of his way during the Trayvon Martin case to keep people calm. In 2008, Obama told his supporters to not “boo” Hillary Clinton and keep it civil. So stop pretending both sides do it. You guys own this.
Trump states quite clearly that violence is okay with him. He encourages it, and lone wolves from all over will hear the call. This will end badly.
@word of advice: I don’t believe there is any jurisdiction in the US in which “flipping off” a person is justification for assault or battery.
Here’s a helpful explainer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_%28tort%29
The general atmosphere of lawlessness, as we saw in Chicago (both in 1968 and today) is how fascists get the public to demand fascist solutions.
The scary part about this is that the normalization of violence in politics here is not accidental. I have continually heard people saying either that Trump will moderate his message or that in the General he will be torn apart by [fill in the blank with opposition research; Hillary’s better debating skills; etc.]. That would happen if Trump allowed the campaign itself to normalize once he has achieved the nomination; if he does that, however, he loses, and he knows it.
Trump must escalate on a regular basis in order to win. It’s a reality show; episode seven must be more radical than episode three to keep the viewer coming back. Eventually you will hear Trump use some version of referring to his own supporters as “Team America” and the supporters of his Democratic opponent as “Team Socialism.” Where do you stand? For “Team America” or “Team Socialism”?
Someone will die. Yes. But for Trump to profit, by the way, the first person to die needs to be one of his supporters. He requires a martyr. What the militia movement is trying to do with the death of LaVoy Finicum, Trump will most assuredly do, and do quite competently, when the first of his supporters is seriously injured or killed. “They said we were dangerous–but it’s our people, American patriots, who are doing the bleeding and the dying. Well, now we’re just going to have to protect ourselves and each other from those who’d rather kill us than allow us to Make America Great again.”
I realize this sounds extreme, and I dearly, fervently hope it is. But I read history and literature and there are processual parallels emerging that are disturbing. Read Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” and pay attention to “the League of Forgotten Men.” Read (and, yes, I’m going to go there) Alan Bullock’s “Hitler: A Study in Tyranny” or William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or one of Ian Kershaw’s more recent works, and concentrate on the German elections in the early 1930s. Be sure and catch the part where in the election before the election that made Hitler the Chancellor the Nazi Party got handed a stinging defeat, and everybody relaxed and thought it was over.
And then think about the campaign Hillary is currently running. Think about the Nancy Reagan comments; think about the latest idiotic jab at “where was Bernie” when Hillarycare was on the table (and the Bernie campaign’s ability to produce within hours a photo of Bernie standing beside her); tell me that the politician who was prepared to destroy the next John McCain or the next Mitt Romney is actually prepared for what will happen if Trump is the nominee and has four more months to escalate before entering the General for real. Tell me why Hillary is not Weimar.
I think that Mitt Romney (sad as I am to say this) is right: Trump has to be stopped at the nominating process because the General Election is no longer a reliable mechanism to do so. And I get a sense (Thank God) that there are some Republicans now slowly stirring themselves into understanding that it would be better to torpedo their own entire political party than to allow it to become the vehicle for Donald Trump.
Thanks, Steve… for the stuff of nightmares. 🙁
TRUMP knows exactly what he id doing . His behavior shows he is totally not qualified for office he seeks. He will win Tuesday by HUGE margins and close out the nomination . Scary prospects . When OBAMA was elected in 2008 and then re-elected I was surprised and pleased . Maybe we were not a racist nation. Now that is all back up in the air. Hopefully the citizens will rise up and send TRUMP down in general election.
Believe Trump is playing a deadly game that will lead towards a “reap the whirlwind” ending, not that his supporters will care.
Their are other precedents, equally troubling, in addition to the ones Steve cited. America’s history of lethal anti-union violence in the 19th century, particularly in the mining industry, is all but ignored by popular historians, but it shows that the KKK wasn’t the only outlet at the time for authoritarian impulses by the ruling classes.
I worry that the angrier elements of the leftist movements will take the bait and throw the first bottle, or that if they don’t, agents provocateur employed by the police will (as they have since the ’60s, big city departments routinely spy on citizens, particularly leftists). Either way, it could be used as justification to crack down with force on leftists, particularly Black Lives Matter. We can see the hostile reaction to BLM’s mere call for equality; if given what they think is justification, I can see these people quickly resorting to violence.
Someone on another thread is claiming that taunts and flipping off Trump supporters justifies the violence, and I doubt he’s alone.
I don’t claim to know what to do about this, and I’m not saying I agree, but here’s what Woody Allen’s character Isaac says in “Manhattan”:
Isaac: Has anybody read that Nazis are going to march in New Jersey? We should go down there, get some guys together, you know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.”
Man: “There was this devastating satirical piece on that on the op-ed page of the Times. It is devastating.”
Isaac: “Well, well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.”
Woman: “Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical force.”
Isaac: “No, physical force is always better with Nazis. Cos it’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.”
“Trump must escalate on a regular basis in order to win.”
Yes, exactly what he has been doing in his reality show/campaign. But of course it depends on finding people who will conveniently serve themselves up as fall guys to help generate the escalation.
I had hoped that Clinton was going to be able to completely turn to the general by now and hone her messages to counter Trump, but it looks like it’s going to be a long slog for her with Trump already turned to the general.
Trump is playing a strategic game. Too bad he’s the only one doing it in either the GOP or Democratic Party.
Steve& AAA – does a trumpshirt dying during kristallnacht count?
jason look for torchlight rallies first, and in all seriousness look for Trump to hire a major Hollywood producer to create a movie of a Trump rally ala “Triumph of the Will” called “Making America Great Again”
Since Trump already has his rise to greatness all mapped out and is actually campaigning for the general, have the Democrats given any thought to whether they plan to participate in the general as well. Or are they still dicking around while Donald’s wife is picking out the White House china pattern?
That’s pretty much a sarcastic way of saying that in times past the general did not occur until after the conventions. This is not those times.
Will she dare to run ads making the brownshirt comparison? Because that might be what it takes.
She’ll have SuperPACs that will.
@AAA Will she dare to run ads making the brownshirt comparison?
@cassandra She’ll have SuperPACs that will.
The problem with that is twofold (and represents the bind Clinton will be in if Trump actually does get the nomination):
1. She will then be hectored by the media for “descending into the gutter” with Trump. I know that jason has always said, “Stop bringing knives to a gunfight” (I think the first time I read that from him it was the Saxby Chambliss campaign). But she will directly be calling Trump’s supporters “Nazis,” and that’s going to play very badly.
2. It’s defensive. It’s “vote against” and not “vote for.” If the whole ploy is to vote for Clinton to “save America” from Donald–even if that’s exactly true–then it is a losing game. People vote for champions, not alternatives to the strong bad guy. And in an electoral sense (and I am not being the least bit snarky about this) I cannot yet see Hillary the champion of anything except the status quo and the control of the bureaucracy (hence, control of the super-delegates).
In fact, I’d expect Trump to start running this line: “One major difference between me and Mrs. Clinton is that she was picked by the party bosses called super-delegates in spite of the will of the voters, while I was picked by the voters in spite of the will of the party bosses. Who would you rather have in the White House? Somebody who owes their allegiance to party bosses, or somebody who works for the voters?”
I’m telling you that Trump vs Clinton will be easier to script than Trump vs the rest of the GOP, and that scares me.
Yeah, I’m still not sure about that, Steve. Are there really enough angry, white men (and a few white women)? I can’t see Trump winning over women and minorities – and he can’t win without them. And I sure as hell don’t see women and minorities sitting this election out.
If it’s a SuperPac, Clinton has plenty of plausible deniability. Her campaign shouldn’t coordinate with SuperPacs. It won’t matter, though, because Democrats and Democrats named Clinton are meant to live with different rules.
Still — I’m with P on this thing: no one has counted the general votes yet that gets Trump to a win. So far, the assumption is that white guys get what white guys want. Which still isn’t counting votes.
You don’t have to run on “trump is a nazi” You run on his craptacular business record, hiring illegals, outsourcing his brand manufacturing to other countries, his litigious nature, and how he never takes responsibility for anything when it goes wrong.
And he is sure to say even more stupid stuff about foreign policy. Torture, war crimes, all of Islam hates us? Hillary will clean his clock on that. (provided she remembers, which she seems to be struggling with at the moment).
Trump is a media whore and no one has yet begun to mine the idiotic things he has said over the decades he has been in the spotlight.
Bernie may have dreams of free college and single payer, but Trump is vaporware.
Unfortunately, pandora, it’s more of a truism than a reality that he can’t win without women and minorities. Trump needs voter suppression, not voter turn-out. And the way I see him doing it is by asking “real Americans” if they are going to allow “the people who’ve run this country into the ground and trampled our freedoms and shipped our jobs overseas” to stop them. The normalization of violence is a prelude to the normalization of voter intimidation when we get closer to the General. It’s probably his most difficult task, but when you think of the states he has to win in order get to the White House, many of them are states where voter intimidation is no stranger to their politics throughout history. Trump has to make voting (against him) seem like “voting against America,” and people who vote against America can’t really be Americans, can they? So do they really have the “right” to vote?
I know that you and others believe I’m over-projecting what can happen, and the majority chance says you’re right. It’s just that a 30% chance of waking up to find Donald Trump as President next January is not one I’m going to stop talking about.
@SussexAnon; Trump is a media whore and no one has yet begun to mine the idiotic things he has said over the decades he has been in the spotlight.
With all respect (seriously), it doesn’t necessarily matter if he can change the rules of the game far enough. Germany got taken over by a man who had spent several years in prison for trying to stage a coup and who was under indictment in three gau [provinces] while he was running in the last election they had.
People have this belief that “the Big Lie” won’t work anymore in our very media-savvy nation. They’re wrong. Tens of millions of people–literally–believe that Obama was born in Kenya, that the Clintons’ path to power is paved with dead bodies, and that 9/11 was an inside job. No, they couldn’t beat Barack Obama, but if you haven’t noticed, their votes have elected a majority in both houses of Congress, and … Mrs. Clinton isn’t Barack Obama.
I hear ya, Steve, and I know anything can happen in the general, but Trump’s support comes from a shrinking demographic – and rallies do not equal votes. Doesn’t mean I’ll be complacent.
(Sorry, no nightmares tonight! Gotta sleep!)
I believe, statistically at least, that you are far more likely to be right than I am on this, pandora, but here’s the problem–
–If I’m wrong, no biggie–
–if you’re wrong, we have a problem–
And there are/were people that believe Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell were good candidates.
The presidential race is a race for the middle 7%, not the fringe that believe Obama was born in Kenya.
As for Congress going to the R’s. Gerrymandering, Citizens United, Obama not sharing his voter file for the first 5 years, D’s not running on any of Obama’s success (cohesive messaging), democrats being generally soul-less when it comes to what they stand for and the normal history of the party in the white house losing seats in congress all contribute to why congress the way it is. In other words, there’s more to it than the Fox News noise machine.
24 hr Trump media coverage without having to discuss a single substantive issue