While being interviewed on FOX News this past Thursday, presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway gave away Donald Trump’s strategy for winning re-election. The more that violence erupts around the United States, she said, “the better it is” for Donald Trump, who, as of right now, doesn’t seem to be making any progress against Joe Biden in the polls. [The polling appear to be pretty much unchanged in the wake of the Republican National Convention, with Trump having a favorability rating of just 31%, and 63% of Americans disapproving of his handling of the pandemic.] “The more chaos, and anarchy, and vandalism, and violence reigns,” said Conway, “the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”
None of this should be a surprise to anyone. It’s what strongmen, and wanna-be strongmen, do. They create chaos, and then declare that only they can stop it. And apparently it works as a strategy. Today in the New York Times there’s an article about a subset of voters in the swing state of Wisconsin who appear to be gravitating back to Trump in the wake of the violence seen this past week in Kenosha, where a clash between armed pro-Trump militia members and Black Lives Matter protesters left two dead just days after an unarmed black man by the name of Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a white officer in the city. The killer, 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse, is a Trump supporter that some are saying has a history of misogynistic and white supremacist views.
This, of course, was inevitable. Donald Trump and his enablers on the far right have been encouraging these kinds of clashes for months now. They did the same thing in 2018, when they actively encouraged militia members to head to America’s southern border to repel non-existent caravans of diseased and violent would-be immigrants. And, right now, they’re signaling to the armed extremists among us that they’re needed in the “lawless” Democratic cities of our nation… Here, with more on that, is an excerpt from Jacobin Magazine.
On August 19, President Donald Trump gave a nod of approval to believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, which maintains that the president is secretly fighting to save the world from an elite satanic pedophile network, calling them “people that love our country.”
One week later, on August 26, Fox News host Tucker Carlson sympathized with Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who killed two Wisconsin Black Lives Matter protesters and maimed another. Carlson suggested Rittenhouse felt he “had to maintain order when no one else would.”
At a glance, these provocations might appear disconnected. But they are deeply intertwined. In the span of a week, Trump and Carlson both gave the green light to extremist elements on the Right, QAnon conspiracy theorists on the one hand and armed pro-police adventurists on the other. In the process they each drew on the same bedrock narrative: that the streets of America — especially Democrat-run cities, but nowhere is safe — are teeming with lawless agents of anarchy who flout authority, terrorize innocents, and threaten civilization itself. Thus besieged, right-wing extremism of one variant or another is not really extreme at all. It is rational, even heroic and patriotic…
We don’t yet know what motivated Rittenhouse to travel across state lines to Wisconsin to take part in the armed, pro-Trump counter protest where he’d eventually take two human lives. What we do know, however, is that a Facebook group calling itself the “Kenosha Guard” started calling on armed “patriots” to travel to the Wisconsin city this past Tuesday to stand up to what they referred to as the “evil thugs” terrorizing the city. [This “call to arms” was then amplified by the conspiracy site Infowars.]
And we know that this kind of activity is something that the President of the United States is actively promoting. Here, from earlier today, is Donald Trump enthusiastically re-tweeting something about the people of America finally standing up “to take matters into their own hands” in cities where Democrats have refused to allow federal forces in to put down protests.
After the murders of the two protesters noted above, the National Guard was deployed to Kenosha, and Donald Trump visited soon afterward, taking credit for restoring law and order. And, at least according to the reporting of the New York Times, some who had been on the fence are now thinking about supporting him in the election, apparently oblivious to the fact that none of this would have happened if he, and those who support him, hadn’t encouraged people like Kyle Rittenhouse to get involved and “take matters into their own hands.”
And, I should add, in these swing states like Wisconsin, it won’t take many votes to change the course of the election. In 2016, for instance, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by considerably less than 1% of the vote. And, in Kenosha County, he won by fewer than 250 votes. So a few thousand votes here or there there in Wisconsin could make an enormous difference this November, as we fight to flip the state back to blue.
It would appear, however, that the violence is just going to keep increasing between now and Election Day. Last night there was another murder. This time it was in Portland. A Trump supporter was shot dead, also in a heated exchange between Black Lives Matter Protesters and militia members. There’s still a lot that we don’t know, like whether or not the victim was shot by a protester, or one of his own people. What we do know, however, is that the deceased man, who was wearing a hat with the insignia of the far-right group “Patriot Prayer,” was participating in a caravan of approximately 600 vehicles that had rolled into Portland to confront protesters. Furthermore, we know that Donald Trump, in his RNC speech the day before, attacked Portland for being a liberal city, overrun by violent, America-hating criminals who needed to be brought to justice… Here, in case you haven’t seen it, is footage of these pro-Trump forces rolling though downtown Portland, shooting at protesters with paint guns.
The President has spent four years inciting violence that his most radical supporters are once again carrying out. Like they did before the 2018 midterms. Like they did in El Paso. Like they did in Kenosha. Like they did tonight in Portland.
That’s the story. https://t.co/m3YX9VULlu
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) August 30, 2020
A friend of mine living in Seattle who posts here under the pseudonym “Nobody” just recently left a comment about Annie Dillard’s 1992 novel “The Living” that I found interesting. In the book, he said, a settler decides clear his land of enormous, 250 year old trees, not by cutting them down, but by drilling holes in them at the base, dropping red-hot embers into the holes, and then just waiting. After a number of days, the trees would just collapse, having burned from the inside out. I didn’t read the whole chain in which this comment was left, but I suspect this was shared in an attempt to explain to other readers of this site what Donald Trump has done to our country… He’s drilled holes in the foundation of our democratic institutions, and dropped in red-hot embers. And now things are beginning to collapse.
Joe Biden, for what it’s worth, came out today condemning the violence in Portland, something which Donald Trump has yet to do… likely because, as Kellyanne Conway says, he knows it’s good for him. “The deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable,” Biden said. “Shooting in the streets of a great American city is unacceptable. I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same.”
Donald Trump will, of course, not do the same. He wants desperately to win, so as to avoid paying any price for the crimes he has committed in office, and he does not care who has to suffer to see that happen. He doesn’t care how many die from COVID-19, or how much blood flows in the streets of America. All he cares about is himself, and staying in power, and above the law. In normal times, a president would appeal to our better natures and call for calm. That isn’t happening here. Donald Trump is instead fanning the red-hot embers. And more people will die as a result.
