In the spring of 1865, a woman named Frances Seward collapsed and died. She couldn’t cope with the trauma of having witnessed what had happened on the night of April 14, when a Confederate terrorist invaded her home and stabbed her husband – Secretary of State William Seward – to within an inch of his life. Frances was collateral damage. A Washington newspaper lamented: “Truly it may be said that the assassin’s blows” aimed at her husband “fell fatally” on her.
So we should acknowledge that politicized violence is nothing new in America. But we shouldn’t take comfort in the knowledge that the Seward home invasion was a traitorous last gasp at the bitter end of the Civil War. Yes, the country back then was unduly fractured. But Paul Pelosi’s skull fracture, at the hands of yet another MAGA loon from central casting, is a scary portent of what awaits us if the Trump cultists continue to wage war on sanity.
Yeah yeah, I know, there are whackjobs on both sides, like the left-winger who shot up a Republican congressional softball practice in 2017. But only one party markets whackjobbery, spews it as official strategy. Only one party features congressional candidates who proudly pose with assault weapons (incumbent Thomas Massie posed his whole family and tweeted “Santa, please bring ammo.”) Only one party has prominent figures – Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, ad nauseam – who shout whopping lies from the rooftops and thus plant nonsense into the empty heads of idiots like the guy with zip ties who yelled “Where’s Nancy?” as he hammered her husband into the hospital.
It’s all so predictable. The lying MAGA minions have long taken their cues from the yet-to-be-indicted thief of nuclear secrets, who has spent the last seven years stoking disturbed saps to commit political violence. Long before he occupied the Oval Office, he urged them to “knock the crap” out of their perceived enemies. He promised to pay the bills of cultists who committed violence (he never paid, by the way). He praised a politician who body-slammed a reporter. He retweeted violent imagery aimed at CNN. He mused that the Secret Service should stop guarding Hillary Clinton so we could “see what happens to her.” He said that if she were to become president, perhaps the “Second Amendment people” could stop her from nominating judges.
This benighted land is littered with losers who are jonesing to make their mark by turning incendiary words and crackpot theories into criminal action. We saw this long before the assault on Paul Pelosi. In December 2016, a locked-and-loaded loon stormed a Washington D.C. pizza parlor in the apparent belief (fed to him by fake news) that Hillary was harboring young children as sex slaves in the restaurant’s basement. Two years later, while Trump was repeatedly tweeting demagogic attacks against Obama, the Clintons, John Brennan, Maxine Waters, CNN, and George Soros, a duly inspired Trump nut in Florida proceeded to mail bombs to Obama, the Clintons, John Brennan, Maxine Waters, CNN, and George Soros.
And sure enough, alleged hammer assailant David DePape is a social-media devotee of diatribes against Blacks, Jews, transgenders, Jan. 6 investigators, “communist” school agendas, the “stolen” 2020 election, Covid vaccines…whoever or whatever MAGAts and QAnon-ers deem to be enemies. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that DePape’s reported battle cry (“Where’s Nancy?”) was first bellowed by insurrectionists at the Capitol. It doesn’t take a genius to state the obvious, that if you repeatedly flood America’s sewer with toxic rhetorical sludge, people with a screw loose will swim in it.
Way back in December 2015, when Trump was already inviting Americans to dwell in a dream world of hatred and conspiracy, I wrote a column that posed this question: “Are we not better than our basest instincts?” I dread the answer.