It’s no secret to anybody that this country is as divided as it has been at any time in its history since the Civil War. In fact, you could say that we are in a Cold Civil War, or perhaps in the ramp up stage to the Second Civil War, God forbid. Political strategist Steve Schmidt called this week’s mail bombings “a mass assassination attempt” and calls Trump, “a tribal chieftain who has declared war on half the country.” Here’s a transcript of Schmidt’s remarks on MSNBC’s Deadline:White House Thursday.
We haven’t seen anything like it since the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. This was a mass assassination attempt, including two former presidents, a former vice president of the United States, a former attorney general of the United States, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. The person who is responsible for sending bombs to all of those people is the person who mailed the bombs.
Donald Trump did not mail the bombs, but he created the atmosphere where a sick person would look at those individuals and see an enemy. Trump makes no pretense about being the commander in chief of all of the country, being president of all of the people, including the people that voted against him. He is in effect a tribal chieftain who has declared war on half of the country. When he incites by attacking and stigmatizing vulnerable minority populations, alleging conspiracy, calling his opponents enemies of the people, calling journalists enemies of the people, what is it that we do to enemies? How do we deal with an enemy when we invoke martial analogies? We kill enemies. And someone out there took him both literally and seriously.
When you look at a Trump rally, the venom spewed at the journalists, the level of menace, the edge of violence, his celebrating body-slams by a congressman who physically assaulted a reporter. His celebrating supporters who punch opponents in the face. Every day, Donald Trump does everything he can for his own selfish political purposes to inflame and incite.
And we sit around now, and we wonder, is there any causation? Of course, there is. Is there anything that he has done that would create an atmosphere that would instigate or trigger a sick person? Of course there is. And so this idea that Donald Trump is held harmless and not responsible is absurd. He has degraded the civility. He has exacerbated the divisions more quickly, more profoundly than any leader of this country in American history.
And now we stand at the edge of — we stand on a ragged edge looking into an abyss. This is partisan violence. This is sectarian violence. This is one of the two political tribes targeted by a sick person. But a sick person perhaps instigated by a rhetoric that Trump revels in all day, every day.
It’s not too far of a stretch to call Trump’s minions a dangerous cult. If Trump won’t change his tactics, and what are the chances of that, we’re only going to see more of the same.
WTF AMERICA?
I knew a woman whose contention was that violent movies from Hollywood were to blame for exciting the lunatic fringe and causing them to act. She might have been right. You remember, perhaps, how the two Columbine shooters loved the movie, “Natural Born Losers?”
This is the same theory, only now we have a US president exciting the lunatic fringe with violent images in his speech. WTF indeed?