Sometimes I Still Can't Even Believe This Fu@#er Is the President
Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, November 02, 2018
[Content Note: Terrorism; disablist language.]
This is just a real thing that Donald Trump said last night, at a campaign rally in Missouri:
We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible, because for seven days nobody talked about the elections. It stopped a tremendous momentum.
More importantly, we have to take care of our people, and we don't care about momentum when it comes to a disgrace like just happened to our country.
But it did nevertheless stop a certain momentum, and now the momentum is picking up.
1. People have continued to talk about the election nonstop. See, for example, endless panels on cable news where a bunch of folks with varying degrees of sensitivity sat around trying to answer the chyroned question: How will the mail bombs and/or the mass shooting in Pittsburgh affect the election?
2. The Republicans did not have a "tremendous momentum" before these acts of terror. But what a super cool way of subtly reinforcing the widespread belief among his cultists that the mail bomb campaign and the mass shooting were "false flags." Obviously, so goes his gross implication, the Democrats and their liberal mobs must be behind these things, which stopped Republicans' "tremendous momentum."
3. Look at Trump, trying to act like a politician — "We don't care about momentum" under these circumstances — which lasts only the briefest of moments, before he's back to his dishonest and indecent argument: "But it did nevertheless stop a certain momentum." Such a goddamn void of empathy.
4. Of course Trump identifies the perpetrators of these crimes as "maniacs." As I noted on Monday:
[Trump is] never going to "call out and denounce" this trash, because he revels in it — and relentlessly exploits it to increase his own power and consolidate the power of his party.
What he'll do — and what his fellow party members and their cultists will do — is continue to say that people like Cesar Sayoc, Gregory Bush, and Robert Bowers are "mentally unstable," implying that their actions are irrational.
But whether any or all of these men have mental illness, none of them behaved irrationally. It's utterly vile, unethical, and illegal behavior, but it also completely logical behavior to respond to decades (or more) of incendiary rhetoric that casts a population as a present threat with eliminationist violence.
That's why there has been no let-up (despite sustained press inattention) in anti-choice terrorism in decades. Killing abortion doctors and bombing or otherwise attacking clinics is an aggressively indecent but logical response to hearing that people who provide and get abortions are committing mass murder.
This isn't "senseless" crime. It's a sense that makes a perfect, devastating sense by obscene standards.
The fact that someone will see violence as a rational and necessary response to demonizing people as existential threats to you is exactly why and how stochastic terrorism works.
Casting the people who act on incendiary rhetoric as "crazy" is one of the key ways in which purveyors of that rhetoric distance themselves from responsibility.
Trump is as predictable as he is contemptible.
Labels: stochastic terrorism, terrorism, Trump