The Bringer of Violence

The perpetual victim is the chief perpetrator

Donald Trump loves violence, especially when it’s committed on his behalf. It makes him feel powerful in a way only humiliating other people can. He knows that violence begets violence; fear begets fear; rage, rage, and so forth. He revels in his ability to set fires that spread—except, of course, when they jump the line.

On Saturday, there was another alleged assassin attempt on Donald (the second in two months, which itself practically beggars the imagination) at his golf club in West Palm Beach. It was only a couple days before this that Donald refused to condemn the bomb threats, school evacuations, and general sense of terror in Springfield, Ohio that he and his running mate have unleashed by their vicious targeting of Haitian immigrants who live and work there. He claimed without conviction that he didn’t know anything about it. And then he doubled-down on his baseless attacks, as he always does. Two more Springfield elementary schools had to be evacuated on Monday morning. 

This kind of development is nothing new; it is, indeed what life in Donald Trump’s America has become over the last nine long years. Threats of violence and actual violence from the right are now a regular part of our political discourse and behavior—Donald makes sure of that on an almost daily basis. He is the primary proponent and promulgator of it—it was only a matter of time before he became its target, too.

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In the early days of his 2016 campaign, my uncle encouraged his rally-goers to assault protesters and claimed that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” as if that was either an accurate description of what was unfolding or a reasonable response to protests with which one disagreed.

Before and during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald encouraged and stoked violence and people listened. Others listened to his anti-immigrant hatred, his racism, and his anti-Semitism as well, like the gunman who killed 23 in El Paso simply because they had brown skin, or the one who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

The man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home looking to murder her, attacked and assaulted her husband, Paul, with a hammer almost killing him. Donald has since made Paul Pelosi the butt of his jokes, much to the delight of his rally attendees.

This is the America Donald Trump is rooting for. Whether from violence inspired by his rhetoric or doctors’ failures to give pregnant women health care when they’re bleeding out, people are dying. And if we don’t change course, people will continue to die.

Every day Americans pay the price while Donald sets the world on fire with his provocations and then spends the day playing golf, completely insulated from the chaos he sows—until this summer.

We know he won’t change—there is no new tone, no evolution in his future or ours. He has no self-awareness, no insight to himself and he believes that the only way to maintain his grip on power is to keep us divided, angry, and afraid.

On Monday morning, instead of trying to lower the temperature, my uncle was on Fox and Friends blaming Vice President Kamala Harris for this weekend’s assassination attempt. To say that’s absurd is an understatement. How many times, for no justifiable reason, have we heard Donald say Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are destroying our country?

Here’s what Steven Cheung, Trump campaign spokesperson, had to say in justification of Donald’s insane Truth Social post in which he wrote, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”:

“Because she’s now endorsing a candidate in Kamala Harris who is hell-bent on destroying this country and weaponizing the justice system to go after her political opponent, President [sic] Trump.”

America can’t go on like this. It is, as Vice President Harris says, time to turn the page.

I worry about what will happen in the next 50 days and the uncertain weeks that will follow. It’s my hope that this will continue to be a country that settles its differences at the ballot box. Unfortunately, nobody in the Republican Party, including its leader, seems to feel the same way.