Let’s talk about Trump and political violence

So, last weekend happened.

Let’s talk about last weekend, then. Before we start (and I’ll remind you, reader, again, before we end) I will state that I am a pretty extreme pacifist. I think that violence and intimidation against people is virtually never justified, and the cases where it is involve clear cases of self defense. I believe that once one starts thinking of guns, it turns everything into a nail, and all you think about is guns. I’ve seen it happen to too many people to ignore it. I also acknowledge that this is my decision and philosophical position with my life and my risk profile and my set of experiences. I ask no one to defend me, and take my safety as my own responsibility. Also, as a transgender woman, I am vividly aware of what the threat against me is, so I will brook no condescension there.

Similarly, let’s talk about **why** political violence is especially bad. The real core reason why is, of course, the line between “picking off your political enemies” and “starting a civil war” is very, very thin. It takes the metaphorical sense of politics as warfare, and makes it quite literal. Again, your mindset becomes one of protecting your leader, and attacking your opponents leader. You devolve into teams, and conflict becomes total.

Ok, so that said, let’s talk about what happened last weekend. We don’t know a lot about motive or identity, but I would encourage you to read about the shooter, Matthew Crooks in the CBS article, or your favorite news link. Ultimately, what happened was “A registered republican took a firearm to a republican event where republicans insist that everyone be able to carry guns, and a gun did what guns are designed to do”. This is against the backdrop of past events, when Democratic congresspeople such as Gabrielle Giffords were shot, to have the attack blamed on them with verbiage about how vulnerable people are in “Gun-free zones”. Ultimately, as of this writing, we do not know anything about Crooks’ true motive in being there or in shooting Donald Trump, but we do know that Donald Trump has, in the past, been more than happy to have armed supporters at his rallies.

Kind of on this note, we cannot forget that Donald Trump, himself, is a political animal founded and perpetuated on the idea of political violence. For a stark example, I will remind you of the circusmstances around the taking of this photo:

I will remind you of the numerous times that this man has cheered on the assaults of protestors at his rallies, of the times he has offered to pay the legal bills of people carrying out violence in his name, of the promise to pardon the Jan 6 rioters, of him sitting there and inciting the Jan 6 rioters, of his perpetuation of the child abuse libel against trans people, of his violent rhetoric against immigrants, of his actual harsh actions against immigrants, of his entreaty to the proud boys to stand back and stand by, of his lukewarm, at best, condemnation of Jamestown, of his literal everything.

Because, ultimately, there is no ideology to Donald Trump. In many ways, his actual policies have subverted traditional Republican values, particularly on trade. The thing that Donald Trump represents, at his basic core, is “identifying the people out there that his supporters don’t like, and finding ways to take them down a notch.” That’s it. That’s the core of him. So of course, he dances with political violence, constantly.

So, as a transgender woman (and I bring this up only to say that it is personal, the threat to immigrants and people who might be perceived as such is even more dire) sitting here while this man runs for president for a party whose leaders have declared “the eradication of transgenderism” as a core goal, who speaks of eliminating people like they were “vermin”, I have a gigantic problem with blanket, unqualified condemnations of political violence that do not involve at least some qualification of what Donald Trump is, and the violence that dances around him and around gun culture in general. Because this man has not experienced the life of “discussing with friends and family about what the conditions would have to be like to detect your own roundup in a mass committing of people or a mass deportation of people, or any long tail of other things.” And that, my friends, is fucking political violence, too.

As a pacifist, and as a political pacifist, one must commit to not just laying down arms but to a world where arms are not seen as an option at all. That means working for a world where threats and oppression are gone and forgotten, and no one feels so desperate as to see violence as their only option. That also means that one treats state violence and stochastic violence as the same category of thing as “a guy with a gun”. Saying “the shooter was reprehensible” without connecting it to the context of “everything that Donald Trump is and stands for is reprehensible as well, because it comes from the same well as this shooter” is not pacifism. It is pro forma uttering of a mantra in the hopes that the problems before it magically disappear. And we are not going to manifest our way out of our current political moment.