The following is from Project-Syndicate written by Jan-Werner Mueller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of Democracy Rules.
Well worth reading and being concerned about.
Trump has been signaling for a decade or so that political violence committed by his supporters is acceptable and might even be rewarded. Those he pardoned for their participation in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol included many convicted of violent crimes.
But Trump and many of his acolytes frame such conduct not as violence, but as legitimate, even patriotic, self-defense; like other right-wing populists, they portray themselves as perpetual victims.
There have been some deeply distasteful postings about Kirk’s killing by apparent leftists on social media, pointing out with schadenfreude that Kirk had claimed that gun deaths were an acceptable price to pay for the right to bear arms. But, on the whole, liberal commentators have gone out of their way not just to condemn violence but to recognize Kirk as a good-faith debater with a “taste for disagreement.” On the right, by contrast, prominent voices have called for repression – invoking the illegal practices of FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover as a model – if not outright “war.”
More worrying still, Trump himself seems to relish the occasion as a pretext to attack civil-society organizations not to his liking. Members of his administration had already declared the Democratic Party itself to be a “domestic terror organization.”
Given that Trump has shown absolutely no restraint in unleashing the powers of the federal government on any individual or organization, the implied threat of prosecuting the opposition should set off alarm bells for any democrat (not just Democrats).
Beyond abusing the law, Trump has consistently encouraged, or at least clearly tolerated, political violence: from imagining himself shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, to encouraging his supporters to rough up people, to describing violent racists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “fine people,” to his apparent willingness to see his first vice president, Mike Pence, be lynched on January 6, 2021, so that he could remain in power…
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While hope springs eternal that Trump will become presidential and seek unity, there is every reason to believe that his behavior the night of Kirk’s killing will continue: polarization has always been his political business model. Unfortunately, at a time when his administration is nurturing not so much a “taste for disagreement” as a taste for cruelty, some Americans might take their cues from him.
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