Anyone can suggest shrinking the federal government and laying off the workers who make it run. To really grab the attention of the Republican primary electorate, you have to paint a more lurid picture. Or so Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seemed to think when he recently described his plans for downsizing the bureaucracy by saying, “We’re going to start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Like almost everything DeSantis says and does as a candidate, the comment was uttered with one eye on Donald Trump. In the Trump era, that kind of statement is no longer surprising. Invocations of violence — both metaphorical and literal — have become so common among Republican politicians that DeSantis is only catching up to what’s going on around him.
The rhetoric of the contemporary right is saturated with fantasies of violence against perceived enemies.
The rhetoric of the contemporary right is saturated with fantasies of violence against perceived enemies. While most of it remains in the realm of fantasy, we should never be surprised when it erupts into reality. It has before, and it will again.
Such rhetoric began with Trump; far-right movements the world over have long valorized violence against foreigners, racial and ethnic out-groups and political opponents. But in modern American politics, Trump took it from the fringe to the mainstream, including the Republican elite.
Running in 2016, he would regularly tell crowds about the brutality he longed to inflict on liberals, particularly protesters. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said about one. His supporters thrilled at these threats. “We all want to punch somebody in the face, and he says it for us,” a rally attendee told author Jeff Sharlet at the time.
Trump superfans came to imagine their septuagenarian draft-dodging champion as a wielder of death and destruction. On T-shirts and flags and in countless internet memes, they reconfigure the out-of-shape 77-year-old into a chiseled warrior riding into battle, muscles rippling as he holds a sword or an AR-15 aloft. Other Republicans, seeing Trump receive the kind of adoration they can only dream of, have followed suit in playing to the darkest violent impulses they know their followers harbor.
The audience for conservative media imbibes the rhetoric of violence every day. Michael Savage, one of the most widely heard radio hosts in the country, says that because of LGBTQ acceptance and other perceived left-wing excesses, “I’m willing to pick up arms. I can’t take it anymore.” Right-wing media stars laugh and cheer about violence directed at climate activists. A popular far-right podcaster tells his listeners that if the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would “violently overthrow” the American government.
Meanwhile, it has become de rigueur for right-wing members of Congress to send out Christmas cards with the whole family, even kids barely old enough to tie their own shoes, posing proudly holding military-style rifles. Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before he was old enough to vote, was feted at Mar-a-Lago and has given fawning interviews on Fox News. Daniel Penny, charged with manslaughter in the death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway car, is similarly celebrated by right-wing media and Republican politicians.
Wherever vigilantism looks like a tool the right can use against the left, it will be venerated and even turned into law.
Wherever vigilantism looks like a tool the right can use against the left, it will be venerated and even turned into law. Republican legislatures have passed laws shielding people who mow down protesters with their cars from civil liability. Country star Jason Aldean’s single “Try That in a Small Town” imagines urbanites bringing their criminality to rural areas and being met with a violent response. It has become the No. 1 song in the country thanks to a controversy fed by conservative media and politicians.
When this is what rank-and-file conservatives hear day after day, hour after hour, are we supposed to be surprised when the fantasy of violence turns into actual violence?
Jan. 6, 2021, wasn’t an aberration; it was the natural response to everything Trump’s supporters had been told in the days and months before — and are still being told to this day. They’re sent a constant stream of messages about the worthiness of violence committed on behalf of their worldview and their values. And they’re told just as often that the American political and governmental systems are broken almost beyond repair.
If you believe that, what options remain? If the broken system produces the outcome you want — especially the election of your candidate — then perhaps the brokenness is a problem for another day. But if it doesn’t, then seeking satisfaction within the system seems pointless.
That’s what happened in 2020. Joe Biden got more votes in the presidential election, which Trump and his allies first (allegedly) attempted to undo through the system’s established channels: lawsuits and appeals to state officials to use whatever procedures they had available to undo the results. When that failed, they tried to tear and pound the system into a shape that would produce a Trump win, demanding state officials “find” votes, assembling slates of alternative electors and, as a last-ditch gambit, trying to get the vice president to simply declare Trump the winner.
When those moves failed, as well, violence was all that remained. Knowing the end was near, Trump appeared before his people, told them that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and instructed them to march on the Capitol. Which is exactly what they did.
Their insurrection failed, and many of its participants went to jail, which may give them pause next time. But the thirst to solve their problems with spasms of redemptive violence remains. It’s being fed every day, by elite figures on the right who believe they can harness the bloodlust they reinforce for their own ends. And we don’t yet know whether next time will be even harder to contain.