The attack on the Capitol is the culmination of Trumpism, and the GOP owns this.
David Corn
Mother Jones, Jan. 6, 2021
This is what Donald Trump has unleashed upon the United States: an unprecedented act of domestic terrorism.
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Trump owned this terrorism. He has whipped up his cultish followers with lies and conspiracy theories. At a rally on Wednesday morning, Trump told his supporters that the 2020 election was a grave crime and that Republicans and Democrats on the Hill were about to destroy American democracy by accepting the results. (During that event, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and chief coup-stirrer, called for “trial by combat.”) Trump directed his frenzied supporters toward the Capitol, where they breached police lines and took over the building. They shut down Congress. They terrorized lawmakers and staff, they fought with security forces, they broke American democracy.
This is all Trump’s doing. He has encouraged violence among his supporters since the 2016 campaign. At his rallies, he encouraged followers to assault protesters and provoked violent threats against journalists. During the Black Lives Matter protests, he threatened to shoot looters. When asked during a campaign debate if he condemned the Proud Boys, violent pro-Trump shock troops, he told them to “stand back and stand by.” Wink, wink. As my colleague Mark Follman has reported, Trump has long played footsie with far-right radicals. Elizabeth Neumann, a former Department of Homeland Security official who focused on counterterrorism and threat prevention, contended in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump has been fomenting violence: “Language from campaign materials and Trump’s extemporaneous speeches at rallies have been used as justification for acts of violence.” His “inconsistent and muddied” criticism of violence and white supremacists, she pointed out, exacerbated the problem: “Extremists thrive on this mixed messaging, interpreting it as coded support.”
By depicting his electoral loss as a theft and profound threat to the nation, Trump signaled to his followers, especially the extremists, that now was a desperate time requiring desperate measures. With such talk, he has become the instigator of one of the most significant terrorist actions in modern American history.
But Trump is not the sole author of this horrific assault on the US government and the citizenry. He has been enabled and supported for years by the Republican Party, Fox News, and other right-wing media, and the conservative movement, even as he fueled hatred and division and his corruptions were repeatedly exposed. They excused his aiding and abetting of a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. They turned a blind eye to the brazen abuse of power that led to his impeachment. They cheered him, as he downplayed a pandemic, ignored public health guidance, and allowed tens of thousands of Americans to perish in preventable deaths. They remained silent as Trump repeatedly demonstrated he had no respect for democratic norms or the basic norms of decency. They remained silent as he presented tens of thousands of lies and false statements to the American public. Instead, they protected him, they hailed him as their leader.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/donald-trump-is-now-a-terrorist-leader/
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