Much of American life has gotten coarser, uglier and crueler in the years since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Even with Trump out of office, his legacy persists, and it erodes American life every day.
On Friday, in a grisly act of political violence, a man broke into the home of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, one of the US right’s most vilified political figures, and attacked her husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull and leaving him with serious injuries. The attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, was reportedly carrying zip ties and duct tape and yelling: “Where’s Nancy?”
Paul Pelosi is lucky he wasn’t killed – a hammer to the skull can certainly do the job, especially when the victim is an elderly man. And while I imagine that Nancy Pelosi is feeling enormous grief and guilt over the fact that her husband was nearly murdered in an attack that seemed aimed at her, she’s also lucky she wasn’t home at the time of the assault.
Such an extreme act should shock the conscience of the nation. Instead, it has shown just how immune to human decency and empathy the Trumpist right has become. Trump’s son Donald Jr tweeted an image of a pair of men’s underwear and a hammer with the caption “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready”.
His father has thus far remained silent, as have many Republican elected officials. Conservatives in the media, meanwhile, are working overtime to deny that the right holds any responsibility here, chalking this up to a random act of violence and arguing that sometimes leftists are violent, too.
That’s not totally wrong: a mentally disturbed man was arrested outside supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a gun this past summer, and another shot at a bunch of Republican congressmen at baseball practice in 2017, nearly killing Representative Steve Scalise.
But there are a few major differences, not least among them the fact that rightwing political violence is much more common than leftwing political violence, and that rightwing violence is much more likely to be fatal than leftwing violence. In the US, rightwing extremists aren’t just more dangerous than leftwing ones, but are more dangerous than Islamic radicals and those inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaida. Since 1994, a majority of terrorist plots within the US were hatched by rightwing radicals.
All political violence is a problem. But in terms of sheer numbers, rightwing violence is a much more significant problem than leftwing violence.
That may be, in part, because of the right wing’s broad permission structure when it comes to unchecked misogyny, threatening and menacing political opponents, and refusing to forcefully condemn violent acts. When Scalise was shot and Kavanaugh was threatened, prominent Democrats didn’t sit in silence. Bernie Sanders, who was reportedly the favored candidate of the man who shot Scalise, immediately came out after the shooting to say, “I am sickened by this despicable act,” and emphasized that “real change can only come about through nonviolent action.” When the man menacing Kavanaugh was arrested, Joe Biden condemned the man’s actions in no uncertain terms, and supported expanded security measures for supreme court justices.
And prominent liberals with national platforms and connections to Democratic administrations didn’t suggest dressing up as a bloody Steve Scalise or a dead Brett Kavanaugh on Halloween. The only prominent liberal to make such a tasteless joke - which had nothing to do with an actual assassination attempt – was the famously vulgar comedian Kathy Griffin, who posted a gory photo of herself holding the fake severed head of Donald Trump; for that, she lost most of her professional work and was booted from her television gigs, investigated by the Secret Service and, according to her, threatened with a charge of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States.
By contrast, threatening and menacing Democrats has become a staple not just of conservative big mouths on YouTube and talk radio, but of Republicans seeking office. Trump, notoriously, used his rallies to encourage supporters to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Republican representative Paul Gosar tweeted a bizarre cartoon video of him killing the Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening President Biden; he refused to apologize for it, and his actions were not broadly condemned on the right.
The Republican representative from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that Pelosi has committed treason, a crime “punishable by death”. The Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer tweeted a video of himself shooting a gun, along with the words “Exercising my Second Amendment rights” and the hashtag #FirePelosi. Blake Masters, a Republican who is running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has published campaign ads in which he is holding guns (in one of the ads, he specifies: “It wasn’t designed for hunting – this is designed to kill people”) and has said that when it comes to what he believes is a war between left and right, “You can recite an eloquent poem about pacifism right before they line you up against the wall and shoot you.”
Republican Eric Greitens ran for Senate with an ad featuring him armed and breaking down a door, saying: “Get a Rino-hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” (Rino stands for “Republican in name only”, slang for moderate members of the GOP.)
There is also the fact of rightwing violence against women, which seems less and less like a political liability. Republicans do not have a total lock on misogynist violence, but the number of GOP candidates accused of abuse and assault is truly stunning – and so too is the party’s general shrug in response. This seems to be another outcome of the presidency of a man who bragged on video about sexually assaulting women: abusing women and girls is simply not a disqualifier for those on the Republican ticket.
And finally, there is the rightwing conspiracy-mongering that predictably draws in those who are untethered to reality, and the related rhetoric that makes fixing the invented problem a kind of life-and-death battle of good versus evil. The anti-abortion movement truly pioneered this strategy, claiming abortion is murder and likening abortion clinics to Hitler’s extermination factories during the Holocaust.
The outcome of telling people that millions of babies were being literally murdered in this clinic down the street was a predictable one: clinics attacked, women menaced and harassed, doctors and other workers murdered. And instead of losing, the anti-abortion terrorists won: the Republican party agreed with their political aims and Republican presidents appointed anti-abortion supreme court justices, and abortion is no longer a protected constitutional right.
The US right has gotten even more unhinged in recent years, with many Trump supporters embracing the QAnon conspiracy theories, believing Democrats are trafficking children through pizza restaurants and in Wayfair furniture, and even mainstream Republicans are joining in on Trump’s “Stop the Steal” refrain that the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn’t).
When you promulgate totally baseless, crazy ideas and convince your followers that the mainstream media are lying to them and that political opponents aren’t just ideologically different but are literally a threat to your life, and then you insist on living in a country where people can be armed to the teeth, it’s tough to act surprised when your followers are crazy and violent.
There is a pattern here that you just don’t see on the left: the fetishization of deadly weapons; violence against women that goes unpunished by the party and its supporters; the kind of troubling conspiracy theories that are catnip for crazies and that demand extreme action in response; and the fantasizing about murdering one’s political opponents, all tossed into the cauldron together.
It’s not a coincidence, given the hyper-masculine misogyny element to all of this, that much of the violent rightwing fantasizing is directed at women, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief among them. This isn’t the first time Nancy Pelosi was targeted by violent rightwing men. During the January 6 insurrection in 2021, she was a target of the rioters who broke into the Capitol building and wandered the halls calling her name in the kind of singsong voices usually reserved for horror movies: “Nancy, oh Nancy! Where are you, Nancy?”
Republicans have largely refused to reckon with what happened on January 6. And even now, they are treating the Pelosi attack like a sideshow instead of the real warning it is. Just hours after Pelosi’s husband took a hammer to the head and as he was undergoing surgery to repair his cracked skull, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, told an audience of rally-goers: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send [Pelosi] back to be with him in California.”
The attack on Paul Pelosi should be a moment of reckoning. For the past several years, it has felt like the wheels on this bus are getting progressively looser, and the risks of conflict, both political and interpersonal, rising higher. Depending on how Republicans react to this moment, it could simply be a footnote – a bad and tragic act, but one without lasting national effects – or one of those historical inflection points we look back on as indicative of the dangerous turn the nation was about to make.
Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk
