Opinion | How Does Trump’s Violent Rhetoric End? (2024)

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I did recently read a great book on the history of the AR-15.

Oh, see?

Oh, it is really good.

You’re ready.

That’s by those two authors, the two co-authors, right?

Yeah, that’s right.

Of course you’ve read it. Don’t bring up books with Carlos in the room [INAUDIBLE].

But did not —

Jamelle reads more than I do. Have you read his columns?

I can’t believe I’ve been left with you two.

Sorry. [LAUGHS]

From “New York Times” Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

And this is “Matter of Opinion,” where thoughts are allowed.

No.

Yes, they’re allowed. [MUSIC PLAYING]

So, Ross is traveling this week, and Lydia is currently on the Columbia University campus reporting on the protests there, as we’re recording this. So we’ll have more on that subject soon. But in their place, doing double-duty, is our colleague Jamelle Bouie, who we’ve been wanting to have on for a long time.

Jamelle —

Welcome, Jamelle.

— welcome.

Thank you guys for having me.

Excellent.

You didn’t know you’d be doing such hard labor today.

Double-duty.

Sorry.

Double-duty. So today we’re going to talk about — I don’t know — maybe a little bit of a grim subject, but it’s one we’ve been meaning to discuss for a while, and that is the prospect of, and the reality of, political violence in the United States.

Now, it’s not a new story for America. We’ve had domestic terrorism, political assassinations, even a civil war. But there are a few reasons I want to talk about this now. First, polling shows that there’s a chunk of Americans who seem willing to justify violence as a tool of politics. A recent PBS NewsHour NPR Marist poll shows that about 1 in 5 Americans believe that violence can be a solution to the country’s problems. This view is also especially prevalent among those who believe the 2020 election was stolen.

And one more reason to talk about this is that the number one movie in America right now happens to be a dystopia about a modern-day civil war in the United states.

Which Carlos and I saw together.

Yes, yes, yes. Not just the two of us. That would be weird. We saw it with other colleagues. And this is actually another reason we’re so psyched to have Jamelle on today, because in addition to being a history buff and a student of eras of political violence, he’s also a movie guy. So the movie’s actually a good way for us to ease into this conversation a bit. I’d like to know what you all made of it. Michelle, can you give us a quick and dirty — a quick and violent synopsis of the story?

I prefer quick and dirty, but OK, so the movie plops you into the end of a full-blown civil war in which breakaway factions of American states are battling an authoritarian US government. The heroes, hilariously, are a handful of journalists, led by a veteran war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst, who are trying to get from Brooklyn down to Washington, DC, where they’re hoping to score a final interview with the president before the Capitol falls.

So, basically, this is a road trip from hell movie, with the sort of post-apocalyptic landscape like you see in zombie movies, highways clogged with abandoned cars, roving militias, refugee camps, and just violence everywhere. One of its most notable features, which has gotten a lot of attention, is that writer director Alex Garland expressly avoids getting political. You don’t get any backstory about how or why the war started. You’re just there, boom, in the middle of all the blood.

Jamelle, what did you think of it?

So, first of all, I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I watched this movie at a screening in Charlottesville. And it was a very strange experience watching it, knowing that, first, a critical part of the film is that the characters are going to Charlottesville for reasons —

That’s where the front is.

Where the front lines are. And there’s one particular scene that my understanding is that it takes place basically 20 or 30 minutes outside of Charlottesville, specifically off of Route 20. And it was just like weird knowing, watching the movie, oh, a bunch of this takes place in my —

Your neighborhood.

Neighborhood. And it was very weird. No, so, I saw the movie and I immediately vibed with Garland’s decision to basically not — I wouldn’t say the movie is not political, but to remove any sort of contemporary American politics from the film.

I like that approach because I think it allows the movie to zero in on what I think it’s actually about, which isn’t so much are Americans on the verge of a civil war, but like, what would it actually be like to express the sort of desires for violence that are prevalent among Americans today, like transposing images and events from conflicts around the world, things that are happening now, to American soil and saying essentially, like, here’s what it would mean for Americans to actually inflict this kind of violence on each other.

So, yeah, I was totally in for it. I was also very shaken up and unsettled by it. And afterwards, I had to go over to Trader Joe’s to pick up snacks for a road trip. And I was staring at a box of crackers for a sec, and I was like, what if this were bombed out?

I hope your road trip, Jamelle, was a little more chill than the road trip in the movie.

Insofar that a road trip with a five-year-old and three-year-old can be chill.

Can never be.

Actually, that’s a lot like a war.

Yeah, I’m with you in the sense that I also appreciated the decision by Alex Garland, who’s the writer and director of the movie, to not do a lot of didactic, explanatory backstory of how we got into this war. He just kind of places you in the middle. Actually, I don’t even know. You said, Michelle, it was the tail end. I have no idea if it’s the tail end or the middle, because even though there seems to be a big —

Ah-ah, spoilers. No spoilers.

Denoueme at the end —

No spoilers.

— a significant thing happens, you could easily see the war continuing in all sorts of ways, I thought, even though there is a certain air of finality to the conclusion. What I like is that the real sort of dilemma or the real question you’re left with is, like, how people deal with it. There are people who side with the secessionists in this story or with the president or the militia groups that pop up everywhere.

I was especially taken by — this is not too much of a spoiler — by the people who don’t take sides at all, people just trying to sit out the war. And to me, that felt incredibly believable. There’s a great moment in the movie when after the journalists who are the protagonists here have witnessed some really bad stuff, they happen upon this town that seems completely separate from it all. Like, there are kids playing in the yards, the sprinklers are going in the yards, the shops are open.

And this reminds me that, of course, you don’t need an entire country to take sides for there to be a conflict, whether it be political violence. Sometimes all you need is a zealous minority and an indifferent or fearful majority to experience serious levels of violence. So to me, the politics was less about how it all started and more about how we I’ll deal with it.

Well, one of the things that the movie made me think of is like, this scenario is actually not what I worry about. I do tend to think that you need some kind of extraordinary circ*mstance, like, for instance, the pandemic, in order to jar people enough to change their theoretical musings about violence being needed to action.

But what I think is happening increasingly frequently is these pockets of political violence and enough political threats to skew how our government operates. I mean, whether you’re talking about an individual getting his rifle and trying to go assassinate one particular official, or if you’re talking about election officials getting enough threats that nobody wants to serve in that job anymore, that’s the kind of thing that I think is pretty much already a problem that we’re dealing with.

Yeah, and I mean, we’ve seen it, right? This all reminds me of a moment in Liz Cheney’s book where she’s talking about precisely this, this notion that members of Congress are too afraid, sometimes, to do their jobs. Here, let me dig up the page.

This is when the debate over Trump’s second impeachment was raging, and she says, “One concern I heard repeatedly was this — members believed Trump should be impeached, but they feared a vote for impeachment would put them and their families in danger.

We were now entering territory where a threat of violence was affecting how members voted, preventing them from voting to impeach the president who had already unleashed the violence. The threats were real. They were coming in the forms of calls, voicemails, social media posts, text messages, letters to members’ offices and homes.”

She says that when one member told her that, I’m afraid it will put my wife and new baby in danger, she said, “I understood his fear, but I also thought, perhaps you need another job.”

Oh.

Yeah.

To your point, Michelle, we are, I think, living through an era of, relative to US history, historically low political violence. There have not been major assassination attempts or an assassination of a president. There have not been mass violent riots of the kind that characterized 19th century American politics.

We are not living in an age of mass vigilante violence that characterized the United States through a large chunk of the 20th century. And certainly, the everyday violence of the Jim Crow South, political violence and otherwise, is not a part of our lives today. And so, I think this creates — in a funny way, this kind of creates the sense that, well, if political violence were to return, it would be something catastrophic.

But I think, like you, Michelle, I think if we were to see an upswing, like a real upswing, it would just look like what most of American history looked like, which is like in the absence of strong federal authority, lots of just local violence, vigilantism, political suppression. That, to me, seems much more akin to what we may experience than like a war scenario.

I guess I’m curious to see what you guys think. Like Jamelle makes a persuasive case that we’re sort of at historically low levels of political violence. Given the conditions in the country now, how concerned are you of this breaking out in a significant way?

Concern isn’t really how I conceptualize it. It’s just sort of like, OK, what is the likelihood that violence against Congress people or people — now, just evolve — the political process is going to erupt? And I’d say that the likelihood is pretty decent that there is going to be some forms of violence. I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be organized. I think it’s going to be much more —

Are you looking for lone nutters?

Yeah, I mean, I think lone nutters —

I worry a lot about lone nutters.

— is much more likely than any kind of truly organized violence. Like, to give an example of what I mean by organized, during the 1870s, in Mississippi, there were groups, not the Klan — the Klan by this point had been dismantled — but sort of groups who called themselves like “white line democrats,” meaning that they were going to vote for white control of the state, that were actually organized into paramilitaries that assaulted polling places, that, in one instance, set up a cannon with its sight on a polling place predominantly used by African-American voters, really organized to either intimidate Republican voters in the state or outright try to kill them to prevent them from casting their ballots.

That kind of violence, I don’t really see — I’m not worried about that returning. That’s why I do find myself always emphasizing that, yeah, yeah, I mean, the polarization is bad now. The threats of political violence are bad. These are things you don’t want in your society. But at the same time, American history, American society has historically been extremely fractitious and on edge.

And to the extent that it seems more so than in the past, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we can all see each other in a way that you couldn’t 50 years ago, right? Like the existence of national modes of communication makes it so that all the things about each other that we hate are unavoidable.

So I think that has an impact making the polarization and such seem way worse. But I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure that it actually is.

Thank you. I want somebody who’s going to support my “this is not the worst period in American history” position. I understand there are scary things and bad things and stressful things, but the idea that this is kind of like an unusually fraught, terrifying moment just doesn’t really work for me. I mean, there were thousands of bombings during a period of the late ‘60s or whatever.

Yeah, not to mention multiple political assassinations in rapid succession, but I mean, there’s a lot of room between a country we would want and the worst period of violence ever. I mean, I’ll be the gullible member of this podcast for a moment. Like, I don’t believe that, whether you call it a civil war or sustained heavy conflict in the United States is impossible or is inconceivable.

And I think that having — maybe for me, just, I lived through a sort of steadily escalating civil war or dirty war during my middle school and high school years in Peru. And that makes me just more inclined to imagine that really terrible things can happen.

And part of it is that I didn’t even think of it as a civil war. That was a way that we kind of defined it almost after the fact. We realized that’s what we had been through. I was like those people in that town, right? I was just trying to sort of live my life amid curfews and occasional car bombs and blackouts, you know? And so, I realize that sometimes you only define it in hindsight. You realize what you went through after you went through it.

I mean, 9/11 broke a seal for me in terms of what I thought would happen in my adopted country. January 6 broke another one. So I guess I don’t see this as an impossible outcome, even if I am persuaded by both of you to not lose my sh*t over it.

I should say, I do think that the United States has experienced a set of political ruptures over the past couple of years, and that there are real threats to what we understand to be American democracy.

But I think my view is that — how far do those threats become explicitly violent? I’m not so certain. Are there moments, like spasms of violence that then peter themselves out? Perhaps. But I do think that there are reasons to worry about the near future of American politics and the integrity of constitutional government in this country.

Yeah, I mean, I was at the Trump rally that was in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, recently, and I was talking to these two women in line, like middle-aged women — could have been my friends, could have been my aunts, whatever.

And they were 100 percent convinced that the election is going to be canceled. They are convinced that all those people coming over the border are military-aged men and that there are behind the scenes plots going on. They are just waiting for this to strike. But you know what? They are not going to go out and riot in the streets when that doesn’t happen. They are convinced that somebody is coming for them.

And obviously, this is kind of an extreme view. But Americans have been told that democracy is on the line, and the other team is coming for them and horrors await. They’ve been taught to fear, but that doesn’t mean that they’re raring up to grab their stockpile of weapons and take to the streets.

But people do see also, I think, spectacular acts of violence. And I mean, the Walmart shooting in El Paso in 2019 targeting Latinos, the Pittsburgh shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue targeting Jews. And whether we think of this as political violence in the same way that assassinating a governor or a president or kidnapping a governor would be, it is certainly violence with a strong political edge. The perpetrators of these attacks often leave a trail of breadcrumbs or manifestos that show their clear politics.

Yeah, and I’m happy to have an entire hour week of episodes on America’s gun culture, but that’s for another day.

Let’s take a break. When we come back, we’ll look more at this moment and what we think Donald Trump’s role in it might be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I want to get back to Jamelle’s perspectives on the history of political violence in America. And I found this clip from Nixon in ‘68, a campaign ad where he explicitly sort of brought up the specter of violence as a campaign tool. It was a series of rapid fire staccato images of protests of bloodied people, law enforcement, and a very sort of ominous background.

Oh, the good old days when the —

There you go.

— president was calling —

Law and order.

— for not violence.

Law and order. But so what do you guys make of that? Because, I mean, there’s political violence, there’s violence that is politicized, and then there’s the politicizing of violence for electoral ends, right? When you hear that, what do you make of it?

What do I make of it? I — I make of it — I feel like I’m selling very short. I’m like, oh, you know, no biggie here.

Nothing to see here.

Nothing to see here.

Keep moving.

Move along. Because I just think of it as sort of like, this is what American political appeals look like. I mean, this is the kind of this, “elect me or people will get hurt” kind of thing, either outside of my control because we live in a lawless country, or maybe because of putting me into power. That’s not an unusual political appeal in the history of American politics. And this promise to bring order to an unruly society is like a recurring one, especially among conservative political movements.

So I hear this, and obviously, because of Nixon, and Nixon not blessed with the kind of voice you want to listen to all the time, it sounds quite ominous. But the substance of it seems almost typical.

So I have a more specific question for you, Jamelle. So Trump gets out there, and whether he’s doing it to rile up his base or to spur them to do something or if he’s just trying to terrify them about what would happen if Democrats take over, I mean, he plays the whole “oh, if I lose, there’s going to be chaos and —”

Bloodbath.

”— madness and the bloodbath,” however you want to translate that one. But that approach works, in part, because he is fairly charismatic figure. But do you see it as something that will carry over? I mean, we always talk a lot about, will Trumpism outlast Trump? But this kind of fascination with violence and bloodshed and chaos in particular.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, to the extent that Trumpism or the MAGA movement or something kind of remains a part of American politics going forward, let’s say, Trump loses this November and decides to leave politics or more likely just ends up in jail —

I don’t think he’s ever leaving.

I would expect that this sort of language, this way of approaching politics, is going to remain. The explicitness of it, which is, I think, the distinctive thing. It’s one thing to be Nixon alluding to chaos and disorder. It’s something actually quite different to say, like, “these are my enemies — do violence to them.”

I go back and forth over whether I think any other person can pick up, any other person who is currently in Republican politics can pick up on Trump’s whole deal. Because I’m of the view that you cannot separate Trump’s appeal from basically the fact that for the previous four decades of his life, he was a celebrity entertainer.

I think that the language, the allusions to chaos and violence and disorder and all these things, are perceived, at least by some portion of his supporters, as basically being akin to like the performance of professional wrestling, something to rile you up, but not to be taken so seriously. And so, I mean, the problem, right, is that people will take it seriously because presidents —

They took it seriously on January 6th, for instance.

Right, right. When you’re in a position of power like Trump, the words you use actually matter a great deal and do shape how people understand their world. But Trump is uniquely able to play this sort of double game of, “I’m serious, but I’m not.” I’m not sure if anyone else can necessarily do that.

We saw Ron DeSantis try to capture the Trump energy, but he couldn’t. Part of that are his own deficiencies. Part of that is that when you strip away the entertainer part from it, I mean, it sounds unhinged as an entertainer saying it, but it hits a very different register when it’s not coming from Trump. We saw this in 2022 with Blake Masters in Arizona, the Senate candidate.

Oh, he came across as weird and dark.

Right, exactly. It comes across as weird and dark —

That was not good.

— when you’re not a guy who can make it seem a little goofy.

Well, that’s the interesting thing, right? And wrestling is a great metaphor because professional wrestling is both incredibly violent and incredibly fake. It’s like, it’s the performance of violence. And in some ways, I think that’s what Trump attempts to do rhetorically. But the question is, can you control it once you unleash it?

And he’s as much a follower of his base and his crowds than he is a leader. Like the reason build the wall became such a mantra is because he saw the crowds responding to it. He tried other stuff, and people didn’t respond to it, but people responded to that, so he went with it. And so, in that sense, it’s fascinating how the language of entertainment is violence. And it’s something that he capitalizes on.

But to the extent that he can turn it on and off like with a switch is not — I don’t necessarily see that lasting. There’s a question of like, could anyone else take up the mantra of Trumpism? Another question is, can anyone else turn it off?

Hmm. Yeah, how does it end? That’s actually a very interesting question there.

I mean, I personally think it ends when Trump dies, whenever that is.

Everybody dies.

So you think he’s going to just keep running forever?

Yes. I joked earlier that I don’t think he’s leaving if he loses. And I really mean that quite seriously. I think if Trump loses in November — doesn’t go to jail, right — isn’t put in prison, then he immediately is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination.

So I’m interested in if he loses, if he wins. When it comes to this question of political violence, is there anything, as this election gets closer, that worries you in this context of violence? After 2020, we saw January 6 happening post-election. And a lot of people are thinking about that scenario. Like, how do you deal with election certification after the fact? Are there things that concern you in the immediate short-term in the months leading up to November and the months leading up to an inauguration?

If you would have asked me like two days ago, I would have said, is he going to try to disrupt his trials with Jan 6 energy, right? Kind of like summoning a mob to harass people. But he tried that this week, and no one came.

No one showed.

They’re like, meh, who cares?

No one showed. What happens when you summon a mob and no one shows up?

Aw.

Won’t be wild.

[CHUCKLES]: So that makes you feel actually much better about the near future. I do think that in terms of the election itself, the one thing that I think is worth worrying about is if it ends up being extraordinarily close, right, sort of like one state deciding who’s going to be president, then I think there’s a chance you’ll see a mini January 6 at the certification offices or whatever of whatever state that is, if it’s Arizona, if it’s Wisconsin, North Carolina. I think the narrower the margin of victory for, let’s say, it’s Biden, the more likely there’s an attempt to physically disrupt the process.

Yeah, I think that’s totally true, although I like to think that part of what happened in 2020 is, just, we got gobsmacked. We just had no idea that that sort of thing was possible. And I think pretty much everybody has put in place some kind of contingency plan for this — I mean, like not just in DC. I mean, my guess is that out in the states. If you’ve got people plotting to kidnap and assassinate Gretchen Whitmer, I’m pretty sure Michigan has now taken that kind of thing seriously.

So, one, we won’t have this crazy pandemic, unless bird flu catches us anytime in the next few months, you know? But we won’t have a crazy pandemic. And two, people are much more on guard. Like, you will see people prep for this.

Oh, boy. Here’s from your lips to God’s ears. All right. I think we can probably wrap up here. When we come back, we will get hot or cold.

Dun, dun, dun.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So we’re back. For the uninitiated, this is the part of the podcast where one of us shares something that we’re really into or not so much. Who’s hot, colding today?

Oh, it’s all on Jamelle.

OK.

Jamelle, hazing, it’s you.

Hazing!

Yeah, it’s me. Carlos, at the start of our conversation, you mentioned that I’m a movie guy. I do watch a lot of movies. And I recently watched a reissue of the Robert Longo film, “Johnny Mnemonic”— not a good movie, I gotta be really clear about this. It’s not a very good movie. It’s very flawed.

But in this reissue, the movie was retooled to be black and white. It wasn’t simply sort of like a desaturated. They actually went through and completely converted the entire film to black and white, adjusting contrast, adjusting highlights, shadows, all that stuff, to really make it sing. And it looks incredible. It is one of the most incredible renditions of a more modern black and white film I’ve seen in a long time.

Keanu Reeves, who is the star of the film — Keanu Reeves in ‘95, very beautiful man — looks absolutely stunning in black and white. And I just really cannot say enough about how good this conversion is.

And I’ll say, the abstraction that black and white adds to the film makes it a little easier to go down. Like you’re not paying as much attention to the very cheap sets.

The fact that it takes place in a lot of steamy alleys and basem*nts. So I’m very, very hot about this. I think it is an interesting experiment in reconceiving an old — an older movie, not an old movie. And it’s worth watching.

So should I watch the original first to appreciate the transformation? Because I haven’t watched — I haven’t seen the original.

I’m really not sure that you should.

[LAUGHS]:

It seems like a bridge too far. No, I’m totally with you on the black and white. I feel that all of us would look 20 percent more glamorous if we could just be in black and white all the time.

Maybe we can reshoot this podcast in black and white. [LAUGHS]

Now you’re thinking.

Well, Jamelle, thank you so much for joining us today and for hot, colding and for sitting in for two —

Right?

— co-hosts. You have done triple duty.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, until next time —

All right.

— guys.

See you guys next week.

Have a good one. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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