JD Vance: “Trump Is The Fruit Of The Party’s Collective Neglect... Trump Is A Cynical Asshole Like Nixon Or America’s Hitler.”

Marjorie Traitor Greene Is An Even Crazier GOP Spokesmodel

Yesterday, ex-congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said JD Vance’s incendiary rhetorical after a mentally unstable conservative tried to assassinate Trump should disqualify him from being Vice President. David Axelrod agreed. Rabble-rousers like Vance are desperate to pin the blame on Democrats, apparently overlooking North Carolina Lt. Gov, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s remarks in a church last week about how “some folks need killing” in the context of a rant about his political enemies. Robinson was chosen to speak at the GOP convention this week.

Vance was quick to blame Biden for the attempted assassination for conflating Trump with fascism. And yet, when Trump first ran for president in 2016, Vance said he was “not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (hell maybe even expand our appeal to working class black poplin the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for encouraging?”

Ever wonder what’s inside the shriveled little brain of a full-fledged QAnon MAGAt? Count on Marjorie Traitor Greene (R-GA) to always be pepared to share some vivid examples. Here are two from yesterday, one above and one below. These are how conspiracy theories take root— not to mention the kind of dangerous and divisive politics that accounts for people of her calibre being elected to office in low-info and backward rural areas like northwest Georgia.

And, no, the exaltation of political violence is not a "both sides" problem, not even close. Do you think you will ever find a Democratic candidate who would make a campaign ad like any of these? This is part of the Republican Party id... and very foreign (even alienating) to Democrats. Those ads help define modern day American "conservatism." And they're proud of them; see nothing wrong with them in fact. It's who they are.

On Sunday, Timothy Snyder wrote about pre-War Austria “where the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated ninety years ago. Dollfuss had introduced political violence into the political system, and was very much ruling from the far right. And he died by political violence nonetheless, by the hand of people who found him not radical enough. In March 1933, Dollfuss dissolved the Austrian parliament, bringing electoral democracy to an end. He transformed his political party (and a few other groups, and a right-wing paramilitary) into a new Fatherland Front. The Fatherland Front government crushed the Left with armed force. Dollfuss began to build a regime on the model of Italian fascism, defined in Christian nationalist terms. That was not enough for the most extreme elements of the Austrian right. In July 1934 a group of Nazis dressed as policemen made their way into the parliament, shot Dollfuss, and let him bleed to death… We might be tempted to think that violence against one side must come from the other side. But the bloody genie, once unleashed, often stays close to home. Those who have made violence normal are especially vulnerable, because they will always have colleagues or followers who think they have not gone far enough.”

[I]t is just worth noting that it would not be surprising if the man who tried to assassinate Trump was, like Trump, a right-wing radical.  That would be typical of the United States, where most terrorist acts come from the far right. It would also be historically normal. Trump, like extreme-right-wing politicians in the past, has legitimated violence.  

Nothing in recent American political life resembles Trump’s call for “Second-Amendment people” to kill Hillary Clinton, his mockery of Paul Pelosi after an attempted murder, his belittling of Gretchen Whitmer after a kidnapping attempt, the stochastic violence he directs against critics to intimidate them and against his fellow Republicans to keep them in line, the brutal language of his rallies since 2016, his vocal admiration for leaders known to be mass killers, and his violent attempt to overthrow constitutional rule in January 2021.

…[W]e should all be aware of the temptations of martyrdom.

Whatever actually happens in an act of political violence, there will be someone, somewhere, who claims that victimhood means innocence, and that innocence justifies more violence by hands that remain ever blameless. This sort of logic is already all over the internet. That move was made in all the fascist cases. When the German Nazis took over Austria in 1938, they raised a monument to their martyrs. The Romanian fascists killed to avenge theirs.  

Trump is of similar mind: he refers to the convicted criminals who stormed the White House as “martyrs” and makes them part of his rallies. He constantly refers to himself as a victim. 

One can only hope that he does not escalate such rhetoric, or direct blame where it does not belong. Doing so won’t help him win an election, but it will make further violence more likely.