“Trump Won’t Turn Down the Heat—He Needs to Play the Victim,” reads the headline from Matt Lewis’ latest Daily Beast column:
…a man wearing body armor and said to be armed with a nail gun and an AR-15 tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office, and online posts say things like “[Attorney General Merrick] Garland needs to be assassinated” and “kill all feds.”
To you and me, this sounds utterly evil, horrific, and disproportionate. But if you sincerely believe, as Trump and his Republican allies suggest you should, that the 2020 election was stolen by the “deep state” and enabled by a corrupt media and RINOs, this reaction—like the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—becomes merely predictable. Indeed, many of the participants in the Jan. 6 riot believed that Trump ordered them to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal.”
Why wouldn’t a subsequent attempt by a supposedly corrupt FBI to jail the rightful president evoke a similar reaction?
Of course, it’s worth asking why Americans would choose to believe this highly implausible and illogical alternate theory of events.
The answer, of course, is that Trump and his allies have told lies so big that violence seems to be the only logical answer.
It hardly matters that their conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive or contradictory. Flooding the zone with shit was former Breitbart boss and senior Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s method of choice to create chaos. But what was once just “triggering the snowflakes” now feels more like a deliberate attempt to stoke a violent uprising.
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What is more, because everyone knows Trump is a thin-skinned loose cannon, anyone who challenges him is cast as the provocateur. So, if you care about preventing a civil war, you have to avoid angering him. This applies to law enforcement. As Tim Alberta confessed to thinking: “If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.”
Thus, (from Trump’s perspective) the threat of violence is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s MAGA movement.
In a sense, we are all being held hostage. You can let Trump continue his lawlessness, or stand up to him, and suffer the (potentially violent) consequences (for which, you will be blamed). That is your choice. It’s heads Trump wins, and tails, you lose.
I’ve been wrong about many things and will surely continue to be consistently wrong in the future, but my 2015 piece about the rise of Trump and the intoxicating culture of victimhood that marked his candidacy remains remarkably prescient, though I say so myself:
…the real reason Trump may be doing so well is on full display during his interview: he appeals to many Americans' feelings that they've been hard done by.
Mexicans are sneaking into the country by the thousands, taking jobs and bringing crime. Meanwhile, big corporate fat cats are taking their business the other way, shuttering factories in the United States and opening them in Mexico. America is run by "idiots" who constantly get taken advantage of by other countries, whether they're ostensibly friendly or openly hostile.
Thousands of American troops protect South Korea while television sets once made in America are now made in Korea. Why, his pals in the construction industry are forced to buy Komatsu tractors instead of Caterpillars, because the sneaky Japanese are undercutting American competition. (Hearing Trump bash Japan, I thought I was listening to Lee Iacocca circa 1992 again.)
Trump's message boils down to, the country is a mess and it's everyone else's fault. And his audience is eating it up, because it can be downright intoxicating to be a victim.
This applies all over the political spectrum - check out Tumblr on any given day to see how left-wingers consider themselves perennial victims - and it's not just an American phenomenon. Even during this Canadian election cycle we have people who oppose Stephen Harper loudly proclaiming he's not just a centre-right politician with whom they disagree, but the new Hitler incarnate. Meanwhile, people who support Stephen Harper think the media (including the newspapers that overwhelmingly backed the Conservatives in 2011, and whom I predict will endorse them again) have launched a jihad against the Prime Minister.
Nothing gets the blood pumping like a pervasive feeling that everyone else is out to get you.
Nothing has changed in seven years. Scratch that: it’s gotten worse. Donald Trump basically lives in the solid gold house owned by the real creator of Itchy & Scratchy, held the most powerful position on Earth, and gets to play golf all day, but he’s still miserable.
As for his supporters, I agree that many of them were indeed driven to an “outsider” like Trump after years of being left behind during massive cultural and economic shifts, but the ones who really go all-in on MAGAhood to the point of storming the Capitol generally seem pretty well-off, as exemplified by the would-be putschist who arrived in DC on a private plane.
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