(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Another armed mob is expected on Thursday at the Michigan State Capitol, the site of previous protests against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictions on social and commercial activity. Event planning took place on Facebook, where organizing groups featured posts calling for Whitmer to be hanged, shot or worse.
The political pathologies on display each day at the White House are no more contained than the coronavirus. They were latent in Michigan and elsewhere before Donald Trump became president. As with his uncanny approach to coronavirus, Trump has simply fanned the contagion.
Whether the U.S. can get through this election (or the years that follow) without political violence is a troubling question. Trump’s politics have always been a self-conscious vector for violence. His rhetoric fetishizes physical assaults. Deeds flowed from his words, with local hate crimes rising after his rallies.
In a 2017 interview, the sociologist and conservative author Charles Murray captured Trump’s dangerous appeal better than anyone. For many supporters, he said, Trump is a “murder weapon,” a blunt object to be wielded against domestic enemies.
Murray’s insight points to the essence of the social contract between Trump and Trumpists, and also hints at its durability. Trump’s purest promise was always destruction. He would tear it down. Blow it up. Repeal it with no plan to replace it. And just as nostalgia for white male dominance is Trump’s theme — his most enthusiastic targets, like Whitmer, are women — destruction is his agenda.
Theme and agenda are intimately linked. Before the nation could be turned over to the clamoring blacks and the browns and the “nasty” women, Trump would blow it to smithereens. The new America would inherit only debt and dust from the resentful old one.
As death spreads and the economy shrivels, you can almost see the promise redeemed. That the destruction may encompass Trump himself, if other forces fail to save him, is no great surprise. In business, he was expert at dragging everyone under — creditors, contractors, employees. No exceptions.
Members of the Michigan Facebook groups shared their fantasies of political violence, first reported by the Detroit Metro Times, amid a deadly pandemic exacerbated by the broken presidency that they themselves helped to install. Marinated in Fox News and Facebook-facilitated propaganda, they have convinced themselves that a vivid chat about killing the governor is a righteous way to express their frustrations.
Their civil war is nurtured by Trump’s presidency. But if this particular murder weapon is laid aside, another can be had. To some Americans, forever resentful of infringements on their notion of liberty, the attack on Fort Sumter was the beginning of a war that never ended.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
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