by Will Bunch
For a nation that’s awakened every morning for nearly two years to a Groundhog Day of pandemic and paranoia, the scenes from Donald Trump’s latest comeback rally Saturday at a fairground in the East Texas flatlands of Conroe could certainly numb the American mind with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
As darkness fell and the crowd swelled to the thousands, the sound system blared the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the same tune that had electrified Trump’s most diehard followers at the D.C. Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. Over at the zealously pro-Trump One America News Network, or OANN, analysts awaited the 45th president as their antidote to what they called “the divisiveness” of President Biden’s first year But more mainstream outlets like CNN had decided — wisely — after Jan. 6 not to cover Trump’s words live but to only revisit his rallies if he actually makes any news.
Hey, guys … Trump made some news! Unfortunately.
In fact, the man who’d occupied the White House little more than one year ago delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history.
It’s impossible for me to understate or downplay the importance of this moment, and I hope that my colleagues in the media will wake up and see this.
A shadow ex-president is rebuilding a cultlike movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?
Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:
○ For the first time, Trump dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers. But two things are clear: Trump is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view, since the future possibility of a pardon offers an incentive to not testify against him. The other is that abusing the constitutional power of a presidential pardon — intended by the framers for grace and true clemency — to clear the jails of his political allies is banana republic-type stuff.
○ In a sign that Trump is increasingly worried about the overlapping probes, he explicitly called for mob action if charges are lodged. Said Trump: “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had … in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
Experts call Trump’s practices here “stochastic terrorism” — broad statements in the media meant to stoke spontaneous acts of violence, in this case to intimidate the prosecutors or even the grand jurors who are weighing charges against Trump.
○ But let’s drill down on arguably the most important word in Trump’s statement: “racist.” What could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.
Thus, it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, Trump is seeking to start a race war.
What happened in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday night was not politics. A politician seeking to regain the White House might craft a narrative around Biden’s struggles with inflation or with COVID-19 and make a case — no matter how absurd, given Trump’s failings on the pandemic and elsewhere — that he could do better for the voters. But increasingly Trump is less a politician and more the leader of a politics-adjacent cult. He does not want to make America great again so much as he wants to keep Donald Trump out of prison, and the most narcissistic POTUS of all time is willing to rip the United States in two to make this happen.
