Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Trump to Start Up Stop the Steal Rage-Porn Rallies Again. Will They Provide Kindling For More MAGA-Inspired Political Violence?
May 25, 2021
2018 Trump Nashville Rally (Tabitha Kaylee Hawk)
By Bill Berkowitz
Forbes led a mid-May story with the headline: “Trump Will Restart His Rallies Next Month—But Where And How Remain Unclear.” The last time Trump held a major rally, it was January 6th in the nation’s capital. As Mic’s Rafi Schwartz noted, that event “ended with a throng of white nationalists, misogynists, seditionists, and conspiracy theorists storming the United States Capitol, threatening to hang the vice president, and generally throwing the country into one of its worst political crises of the past century.” What will happen when the former president once again takes his Stop the Steal Rage-Porn show on the road, staging rallies across the country? Will those rallies provide kindling for future riots?
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the former president’s chief supplicants, said Trump is “very anxious to get back in the game,” adding that he “wants to do rallies.”
Forbes’ Jack Brewster cites reporting by The New York Post, “Trump will relaunch the rallies after more than three months mostly out of the public eye, other than attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February and participating in several television interviews since leaving office on January 20.” He will hold two rallies in June and another around July 4th.
Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin speculated that there will be “Stop the Steal” blathering, criticism of President Joe Biden, Trump taking credit for COVID vaccines, attacks against Republicans not towing his Big Lie line, and “He’ll most likely also continue to tease a 2024 run for the White House.”
Death threats, intimidation and harassment are the orders of the day for many in the Republican Party courageous enough to disavow Trump’s Big Lie; that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and was “the crime of the century.” Will GOP elected officials’ continuous downplaying of the January 6th riot, despite the fact that more than 470 people have been charged with crimes including entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct and assaulting law personnel, inspire more violence? Thus far, a majority of congressional Republicans are adamantly opposed to a bipartisan January 6 investigative commission.
A survey by The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, a long time conservative think tank, found that 39 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Daniel Cox, director of the Center, said: “I think any time you have a significant number of the public saying use of force can be justified in our political system, that’s pretty scary.”
Jill Sanborn, the head of counterterrorism at the FBI, recently told Congress that “the FBI assesses there is an elevated threat of violence from domestic violent extremists, and some of these actors have been emboldened in the aftermath of the breach of the U.S. Capitol. We expect [that] racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, and other domestic violent extremists citing partisan political grievances will very likely pose the greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021 and likely into 2022.”
Repeated Lies Become “Truth”
“No former president, and certainly no president defeated after only one term, has so dominated his party after he left office. So Trump’s words matter,” Peter Wehner, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, recently wrote: “The repetition of the lies not only causes tens of millions of Americans to embrace them; over time, it deforms their moral sensibility. It creates an inversion of ethics, what in philosophy is known as the ‘transvaluation of values,’ in which lies become truth and unjust acts are seen as righteous. Believing the deceptions also becomes a form of virtue signaling, a validation of one’s loyalty to others in one’s political tribe. In this case, of course, what we’re dealing with is not just any lie; it’s a particularly destructive one, among the most dangerous a democracy can face. It erodes confidence in our elections, the rule of law, and our system of government.”
And what of those who challenge the Big Lie? Liz Cheney was voted out of her House leadership post after criticizing Trump’s Big Lie. Georgia Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to undo the election results have received death threats and been harassed. Trump has vowed to “primary” any Republican who fails to tow the party lie. And continuing to defend this alternate reality, a majority of House Republicans, have voted to oppose a bipartisan January 6 investigative commission. A similar fate appears almost certain in the Senate.
Intimidation and violence by Trump supporters remain a threat. "’It's never too late’ for pro-Trump extremist groups like the Proud Boys to mobilize, because the right-wing political climate hasn't shifted much since Trump left office, federal prosecutor Jason McCullough argued at a hearing for one of the accused Proud Boys leaders,” CNN reported.
"It's not as if the effort by some political leaders and media figures to stoke this sort of anger has abated in any way," Washington D.C. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said at a recent court hearing.
According to CNN, “Most Trump supporters still believe his lies about 2020, according to recent polling, including a Quinnipiac University survey from February that found 76% of Republicans think there was "widespread fraud" in the election. There is no proof of massive vote-rigging, audits in key states confirmed the accuracy of the results, and election officials from both parties said the vote was free and fair.”
It’s beyond bizarre to wake up every day in this not-so-post-Trump world where truth is conceived through the repetition of lies; to understand that millions of people have traveled through the looking glass into an alternate reality; and, that supporters of this alternate reality actually pose an ongoing threat to an exceedingly fragile democracy.
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.
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