In the days before the 2020 US election, the expensive shops and elegant restaurants of Manhattan’s Upper East Side near where I live were battened down in fear. The managers of Madison Avenue’s designer fashion boutiques and luxury goods stores boarded their windows in planks and plywood and instructed their employees not to come to work. Depending on the outcome of the election that week, they were expecting mobs furious with the result to smash, loot and burn.
The anticipated mayhem wasn’t expected to come from Donald Trump supporters refusing to accept defeat. There aren’t many Trump supporters in Manhattan and the ones there are tend to spend their money at Oscar de la Renta and Bottega Veneta rather than breaking the windows to help themselves.
The violence was expected from the same source from which it had come that summer, when mobs agitated by the left-wing protesters of Black Lives Matter and Antifa had rampaged across the city. In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, the country had been engulfed in demonstrations, many of which had turned violent, leaving several police officers dead, hundreds injured and billions of dollars in property damage. New York City had seen some of the worst rioting. If Trump had won, big cities were again prepared for another bout of chaos on the same scale.
In the event there was no political violence that November. Joe Biden won the election. Most Manhattanites celebrated. Store owners and residents breathed easy.
As Trump became the target of a second assassination attempt in two months last weekend, it’s worth remembering that episode, which, like the violence that erupted that summer, has been conveniently memory-holed by many.
For months we have been given sombre warnings by officials and the media that if Trump loses again in November, we should be prepared for mass violence from his supporters that could even propel the country to the verge of a civil war. As Juliette Kayyem, a lecturer at Harvard and former Obama administration official put it recently in a television interview: “The government isn’t ready for the violence Trump might unleash.”
The Biden administration’s Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared that “far right and white supremacist” groups are the major source of potential domestic terrorism. But so far this year two gunmen have come close to committing the most consequential act of political violence on American soil in the past 50 years. Neither was a Trump supporter or right-wing avenger. Both wanted Trump dead.
To be sure, Trump’s rhetoric and behaviour after the last election and before the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 has incited some of his supporters to acts of violence. He continues to threaten to reject the outcome of the election this time too if, as he claims, it is decided illegitimately. He bears his share of responsibility for escalating the threat to domestic peace and order.
But as the Republican candidate now dodges bullets from Pennsylvania to Florida, surely we ought to be getting used to the idea that the Trumpian right has no monopoly on American political violence?
In the wake of the latest attempted murder at Trump’s Palm Beach golf club on Sunday, leading Republicans have blamed Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democrats for inflammatory rhetoric that they say has encouraged gunmen to make history their own way.
There’s no doubt that arguing Trump is an existential threat to the American republic, as Democrats and the media repeatedly do, might encourage some of his opponents to try to take him out. But the suggestion that political opponents should refrain from making such claims for fear of stirring someone’s bloodlust is absurd. The allegation that Trump is about to overthrow 250 years of democratic self rule for Americans may be overblown, but it’s neither wholly without cause nor out of the mainstream of traditional political rhetoric.
But what should concern Democrats and their media supporters is the very evident willingness of people on the left in America to commit violence just as much, if not more than the supposed armies of right-wing militias ready to upend democracy in Trump’s name.
US social and political stability is as fragile as it has been since the 1960s. Another close election in a little over six weeks seems a near certainty. It is by no means just Trump supporters who may refuse to accept the election result if it goes the wrong way.
The ground has been well laid for claims that a Trump victory would be illegitimate. This year we have seen efforts by multiple Democratic-controlled states to bar his name from even appearing on the ballot on the bogus grounds (rejected in a Supreme Court ruling backed even by justices appointed by Biden and Barack Obama) that he is an insurrectionist. Though he is legally entitled to run for office, his status as a “convicted felon” - a verdict delivered only in a highly politicised trial that may well be overturned on appeal - is used by critics to argue he is unfit for office. Once again Americans are being fed stories that nefarious foreign interference on his side is swaying voters. If he wins again in November with a narrow majority in the electoral college having lost the popular vote - as happened in 2016 - the claim that his victory was somehow illegitimate will be louder than ever.
Don’t think that the kind of men who have now twice tried to save the republic from another Trump term in the most violent way imaginable won’t do so again.
The Times
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