Supporting Trump = Supporting a Culture of Violence

I - like I suspect many others - know outwardly good and decent people who to my dismay and horror continue to support and his increasingly violent rhetoric which seeks to demonize his political opponents and those in the justice system seeking to hold him accountable for his misdeeds.  Indeed, he seems to be inviting his more rabid supporters to engage in actual violence. Yet these "good and decent" people continue their support of this foul demagogue, often never coming out of the bubble of right wing "news" outlets.  One is left shaking their head and wondering whether lower tax rates, or often denied racism against blacks, brown skinned migrants, - indeed, anyone labeled as "other" outweighs supporting decency and basic morality.  Can one truly claim to be a "good Christian" and support a man who tore families apart an literally put children in cages?  I think not, as does a column in The Atlantic which argues that Trump supporters need to be confront and made to look t themselves an the violence and lies they support. Are they like their Furhrer, Donald Trump, and supportive of spewing endless lies, encouraging violence and depicting others as less than human who they really are?  Sadly, the answer appears to be "yes" and they need to be held to account.  Here are column highlights: 

Voters need to confront the reality of what supporting Trump means.

On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.

The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.

Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: . . . . Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. . . . . And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. . . . . She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.

But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.

Meanwhile, Trump also had words last week for the people trying to hold him accountable—or, more accurately, for their children. The day before he promoted imagery depicting the torture of the sitting president, Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he mentioned the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over his hush-money criminal trial: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately,” , , , ,

Then, on Saturday, Trump blasted out a New York Post article that included Loren Merchan’s picture to his followers.

Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”

Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.

Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages?

After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?

Trump’s apologists—especially those who claim to be against Trump but are sympathetic to the movement he leads—will complain that such questions are un-American, and that we should not judge other citizens for their choices. This is disingenuous caviling: Every day, both in politics and in our daily lives, we reach moral conclusions about one another’s choices. More to the point, tolerating and even celebrating violent images and despicable language is a perfectly legitimate cause for looking down on the people who engage in such behavior.

(The whining about judgment is particularly ironic coming from Trump adherents, who constantly judge others while cheering on Trump’s descriptions of other Americans as “vermin” and “thugs”—all the while constantly complaining about how others are judging them.)

Another thought exercise might clarify the problem. Imagine someone who seems, in every way, like a perfectly good neighbor, but in a discussion he says that his favorite candidate for president would be the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.

I doubt many of us, faced with a neighbor who supports a racist and former Klansman, or idolizes a rambling anti-Semite, would shrug and take comfort in how neat he keeps his lawn. We might start to suspect that such a neighbor is not a good citizen—and, given the hate that he supports, maybe not a good person, either.

[A]t some point, we have to decide when to levy a moral judgment that puts these choices beyond the realm of a normal political argument. . . . .Unfortunately, we’re not getting much help in making those determinations from some of the media.

Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now: Is this who you are?