The verdict we knew was coming and the violence we can expect
Another grievance on the pile for Americans already primed to commit political violence.
The question was never whether he was guilty, it was how guilty is he? Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 counts of fraud in his New York criminal trial because he is a fraud. And he’s so good of a fraud that he’s convinced as much as a third of this country that he’s doing this all for them. In response, they’re ready to go to war for him.
“I feel this cool resignation, this resoluteness, that we will live as a country, and we’re not going to go down, we’re going to get back up, we’re going to regain our strength, and we’re going to vanquish the evil forces that are destroying our republic,” Jesse Watters said following the verdict to a prime time audience of millions on Fox News. “We will seek justice, we will guarantee that.”
Watters doesn’t mean that he’ll actually be one of the Americans who, in the months to come, will commit violence on Trump’s behalf. But he’s happy to rile up the right-wing masses for a fat paycheck. In the coming days there will likely be an increase in threats to government and court officials in New York and elsewhere; right-wing media will try to expose the jurors and, if they do, their lives will be under threat. This will all coincide with ongoing threats to election workers as Trump and Republicans continue to sow distrust in the November election as part of their pregame work to overturn any results that don’t send Trump back to the White House.
Trump now needs to win not just to repair his fragile ego, but for the very urgent reason that becoming president again may help to keep him out of prison.
Just as the question in this trial was never about Trump’s guilt but about whether the jury would convict him for his many and obvious crimes, the question now is not about whether the response from Trump and others like Watters will induce violence but how widespread that violence will be. Trump’s supporters, while for the most part too cowardly to be willing to die for him, are certainly willing to kill others on his behalf. Over the years, Trump has egged them further and further on, resulting in a deadly insurrection attempt, a massacre at an El Paso Walmart, and too many acts of right-wing terror for me to remember right now.
Last week, police near my hometown — through the sheer dumb luck of a random traffic stop — caught what might have been the next right-wing domestic terrorist when they pulled over Dalton Mattus and found the pipe bombs he had made to protect himself against “undocumented immigrants and a corrupt government.” I spend my days reading online threats based on right-wing grievances and conspiracies like the ones Mattus constantly posted about. Sometimes they’re from people like him, people on the margins who have largely lost at the game of life and are looking to others for fulfillment, even if it comes at the end of a rifle with a head full of misguided politics. But most of the people I find in my work, whose threats and intimations about violence, whose rants about defeating the evil forces of liberalism and democracy, are much more successful than Mattus. They’re respected members of their communities who believe Trump’s lies about elections, and are part of what can best be described as a Christian nationalist authoritarianism movement that says they’re the ones protecting the country from ruin, when they’re actually the ones most actively hastening it.
They’re sitting election officials who believe in lies about elections. They’re people who believe Trump’s fraud so deeply that even the evidence in front of their own eyes that says there is no widespread fraud in elections is not enough to convince them of that very obvious truth. They have their own truth now.
I feel like I’m watching a satirically stupid summer blockbuster when I see someone like Jesse Watters intimate that the retribution for today’s verdict will be outright violence. It all seems absurd to the point of unbelievability, but these bizarre and troubling scenes are the markers of our dumb and violent time.
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P.S. Next week I’ll have some exclusive information on the Trump-backed lawsuit brought by an election denial official in Fulton County that seeks to set a legal precedent making it easier for election deniers to throw out election results in November. Also next week, Bree and I will have a podcast episode discussing the Mattus case and its broader implications on right-wing violence.
Well said! We are jumping for joy driving back from Mpls.
Note that neither the Fox pundits or Republican enablers say Trump is "innocent." Why is no one complaining he is innocent? Because they know he's not.