Forget all the flags and fireworks. Forget the solemn rhetoric in dulcet tones about blood shed and sacrifices made by our forbears to secure our freedom. Some of our countrymen’s conception of why American government exists is this and this alone: to profit themselves and their friends and to punish their enemies.
Michael A. Cohen (not the disbarred Trump lawyer) examines the effort to make Ashli Babbitt the Trumpist right’s Horst Wessel:
On Jan. 6, Ashli Babbitt, along with thousands of other supporters of former President Donald Trump, stormed into the U.S. Capitol. She tried to be the first in the mob to climb through broken glass in a door to the Speaker’s Lobby as members of Congress stood nearby. Instead, Babbitt was shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol Police officer.
Now the former president who, during his time in office, politicized the courts, the media and our elections is doing the same with law enforcement by turning Babbitt into a political martyr.
As president, Trump regularly defended police officers when they used deadly force against Americans, and even encouraged them to do so. Be “rough,” he counseled the police. “Please don’t be too nice” when putting people into paddy wagons.
But with Babbitt, Trump has adopted a very different tone. She was an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman,” he told Fox Business host and key Trump enabler Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. Last week, he said there was “no reason” for Babbitt to have been killed. Days before that, he sent an email to supporters asking, “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?”
The name of the person who pulled the trigger has not made public. But considering Babbitt had marched on the Capitol in support of the former president’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen, Donald Trump is, arguably, the person most responsible for her death.
But this latest Trump tripe is more than just an attempt to whitewash the Jan. 6th insurrection Trump himself instigated.
The martyrdom of Babbitt suggests there should be a two-tiered justice system in Trump’s America: one where the police have carte blanche to use violence against his political enemies and the other where they must stand down when facing the fury of his supporters.
This is the Party of Trump’s conception of what government exists for, and not just its justice system. In its conception, the notion of using government to promote the “general welfare” (the phrase appears twice in the U.S. Constitution) is laughable. Parties elect legislators to profit themselves and their donors, to punish political rivals/enemies, and to keep undesirables in their places. It wasn’t always Republicans doing so, but it is predominantly Republicans doing so today.
It is why robber barons bought elections and masterminded wars.
It is why whites across the South overthrew Reconstruction governments and instituted Jim Crow. It is why whites rioted in Wilmington, massacred Blacks in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, and lynched thousands of others for decades.
It is why there are 12,000 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. spending nearly a billion dollars each year: to secure government largesse for their clients, to keep federal regulators at bay, and to keep tax rules they like advatageous and those they don’t unenforced.
It is why Republican legislatures this very day are advancing hundreds of laws to secure the blessings of power and money for themselves and their donor-friends, to limit the vote to ensure only the right people’s voices (their supporters) are heard and their needs addressed, and as always, to keep undesirables in their places, whatever their color.
It is why high-ranking military officials feared the former president might try to use federal troops to affect a coup in January. Because in Trump’s mind and in the minds of his closest supporters that is what goverment is for, to profit themselves and their friends and to punish their enemies.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is a loser, thinks Trump. Naturally, he and his supporters believe their political rivals think the same way and will act on that. Projection and paranoia. It’s always projection and paranoia.