Title : THE TRUMP EFFECT: DO HIS WORDS INCITE VIOLENCE?
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THE TRUMP EFFECT: DO HIS WORDS INCITE VIOLENCE?
TRUMP'S ANTI-ABORTION INCITEMENT
By: Michelle Goldberg
The New York Times
30 April 2019
Last week, The Washington Post’s tally of Donald Trump’s false and misleading claims hit a milestone, topping 10,000. His untruths, which lately average almost two dozen a day, have long since stopped being news, becoming instead irritating background noise. So when, on Saturday, he told a particularly lurid lie about infanticide at a political rally in Wisconsin, it was, like so much in this administration, at once shocking and unsurprising.
As his raucous crowd booed and screamed, Trump described a hideous scenario that he insists Democrats approve of. “The baby is born,” said Trump. “The mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully” — at this, he seemed to mime rocking an infant — “and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” He made a chopping motion with his hand.
Trump was elaborating on the willfully misunderstood words of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, who, in a radio interview in January, responded to a Republican hypothetical about a woman requesting an abortion during labor. A pediatric neurologist by training, Northam described what actually occurs when a woman whose pregnancy may not be viable gives birth. If “a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” he said. “The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
At the time, Republicans seized on Northam’s words to accuse Democrats of supporting infanticide. In a barrage of legislative propaganda, they put forward laws meant to prohibit murderous behavior of the sort Trump described, which is, of course, already illegal. The point of these proposals isn’t to right an existing wrong, but to put Democrats in a no-win situation. To vote in favor of them is to concede the premise that the bills address something real. To oppose them is to be accused of tolerating baby killing.
It’s tempting to ignore the president’s mendacity, since, as with so much of Trump’s malicious propaganda, it’s hard to counter it without amplifying it. Trump’s lies work to focus public attention on issues of his choosing; if Democrats are trying to explain that they don’t support infanticide, Trump has already won.
But leaving the lie unchallenged is also dangerous. Abortion providers are regular targets of domestic terrorism, and Trump’s lies serve as incitement. In 2016, a man fired an AR-15 inside a Washington pizzeria because he believed right-wing conspiracy theories that it was the epicenter of a child sex trafficking ring involving Hillary Clinton. Now the putative leader of the free world is spreading tales about unimaginable Democratic depravity toward innocent children.
It’s not a stretch to imagine an unstable Trump acolyte taking him both seriously and literally. Indeed, it seems that at least one already has. Last week, a 30-year-old Trump supporter named Matthew Haviland was arrested and accused of threatening to rape and murder a professor who supports abortion rights. According to an affidavit by an F.B.I. joint terrorism task force officer, Haviland wrote in an email, “I will kill every Democrat in the world so we never more have to have our babies brutally murdered by you absolute terrorists.” He also made over a hundred threatening calls to an abortion clinic.
Besides their potential to inspire violence, Trump’s words are a cruel insult to parents who have to make agonizing decisions about end-of-life care for babies that are born extremely prematurely, or with serious anomalies. Doctors and mothers don’t choose to “execute” newborns. They are forced to decide, in excruciating situations, when to forgo medical interventions and provide palliative care instead. There are exceedingly rare cases where babies survive an attempted abortion, but federal law already extends the same protection to them due any other infant.
If you’ve ever had a baby, the absurdity of Trump’s words should be obvious. Try to imagine what would happen if, after giving birth, you asked your ob-gyn to kill your child. You’d probably end up committed.
None of this is likely to matter to the president or his fans. Trump’s lie gives them something too valuable to let go of — a sense of moral superiority over those who would condemn the president and his movement. As Haviland allegedly wrote in one seething email, “You who try to shut people up based on race, you who take a president who’s taking our country in a place of more freedom rather than less, you who would brutally murder a child after they were born (or before they were born). You are evil.”
This mix of thrilling self-righteousness and justified hatred is the effect incitement is supposed to produce. It won’t be undermined by debate or fact-checking. But ignoring Trump’s lies doesn’t make them disappear — if anything, his deceptions are becoming only more elaborate and grotesque. We will be lucky if the consequences aren’t deadly. It’s hard, after all these months, to get worked up about Trump’s fantasies, but there are still people in America unbalanced enough to believe their president tells the truth.
NOTE: It's arguable whether or not Trump understands that his pronouncements can inspire folks to violence. Given what we've witnessed over the past two-and-a-half years - gross incompetence, racist and misogynist narratives tossed willy nilly across the landscape and a level of self-absorption unseen in any prior President - I have a feeling that he's ignorant of the effect his words might have. Sure, he's very much aware of the effects of his "Lock Her Up" chants at his rallies, but one assumes that by and large the attendees are sane and understand that he's tossing them "red meat" just to keep them in his camp and to spice up his "good times" rallies.
But we've seen the effects of this kind of rhetoric in the Pizzagate case and in dozens of other attacks on abortion clinics and the murder of more than one physician who provides abortions.
Trump, of course, who accepts responsibility for nothing if the results are bad, would toss off the murderers, bombers and domestic terrorists as simply "bad people" acting on their own that have nothing to do with him. But as Ms. Goldberg points out in her piece, there are still sufficient numbers of people in America who are unbalanced enough to believe that the President is telling the truth.
But even labelling folks who commit violent acts as "unbalanced" is a cop out. Was 20 year old James Fields, who travelled from Ohio to attend the "Unite The Right" protest in Charlottesville and rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-protesters that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer "unbalanced?" Or was he just an over-zealous, over-passionate believer in the rightness of his cause? Same with Edgar Welch, the 29 year old who drove up to Washington, D.C. from North Carolina to avenge the purported child molestation ring being run out of a local D.C. pizza joint. Both of these men can only be labelled "unbalanced" from a post-incident perspective. Both, prior to their taking action in a cause they firmly believed in, were perfectly normal young men.
Thus, when Trump intones that there are "very few" domestic terrorists or that there are "very fine people on both sides," what he's doing is absolving himself of responsibility for anyone acting out due to his fiery and intemperate rhetoric while minimizing the potential threat perfectly normal men pose to all of us. Trump is playing an extremely dangerous game even if he is unaware of it and it's our lives that he is playing with. The ex-post facto characterization of mass killers as "deranged" or "unbalanced" provides us a comforting salve as we try to absorb the horrors of such acts and gives us an out by believing that only deranged and unbalanced folks are capable of such acts of terror and bloodshed.
But by and large, it just isn't necessarily so.
Take Care!
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