Trump Claims Ashli Babbitt Was Assassinated By ‘Head Of Security For Certain High Official. A Democrat’

Ashli Babbitt has just transcended to another plane. She is now going beyond a footnote in history on the nation’s worse day, she is headed for full fledged wingnuttia martyrdom as Qashli Babbitt, the Horst Wessell of her particular fascist movement. Paul Gosar, arguably the most anti-American man in Congress, took up her standard this past week and now Donald Trump is fully on board, calling her “a wonderful woman,” completely forgetting that she was there to hang his vice president. Or, maybe he does remember that and that’s why he thinks she’s wonderful.

Trump has not only fully endorsed her martyrdom, he has escalated it to the next level, alluding to it being a political assassination by an official tied to a key Democrat. This is not good.

Thread. Short and spot on https://t.co/Y7RRf0rIG7

— Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) July 11, 2021

What you are seeing take place, and this has been happening since January 6, is that Trump and right-wing media are rewriting history. Now Ashli Babbitt, rather than being a fool who kept going when video shows that others around her were warning that the security officer had a gun, is an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” and the target of a political assassination. And the corollary to that, as Trump lies about next, is that it was a “peaceful protest” with “so much love.”

"There was such love at that rally … the love in the air, I've never seen anything like it" — Trump has completely rewritten the history of the deadly January 6 insurrection he instigated pic.twitter.com/wpX4fvXaqT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2021

This has been shaping up for weeks. This is the GOP platform, that the election was stolen, January 6 was a peaceful protest, people jailed for crimes on January 6 are political prisoners, and now we have a full blown martyr, Qashli Babbitt. It all ties up with a bow.

Babbitt has been called the “Horst Wessell” of MAGA. Wessell was a young student who was killed in the slums of Berlin during the rise of Nazi Germany and he was made a martyr by Joseph Goebbels as Trump is making one out of Babbitt. Salon:

Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old QAnon supporter and Trump superfan who was killed in the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, is already far more famous in death than she ever was in life. Her fate reminded me of a famous 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” “He’s Alive,” in which Adolf Hitler’s ghost (Curt Conway) returns from the grave to teach a young neo-Nazi named Peter Vollmer (Dennis Hopper) how to manipulate a crowd. Hitler explains that exploiting the death of an obscure follower transforms that individual into a heroic martyr. “This is an act of friendship,” says the spectral Führer. “We are allowing him to serve the cause.”

Whether or not Donald Trump and his movement think they are doing Babbitt a favor by lionizing after her death, she has clearly become a sacrifice to the ex-president’s ego and glory. Trump’s supporters are eager to uncover the name of the police officer who shot Babbitt, but much less eager to remember that she died after Trump urged an angry right-wing mob to storm the Capitol. The video of her shooting, which makes clear that Babbitt and other members of the mob were literally trying to break into the House chamber and attack members of Congress, is likewise swept under the rug. That’s without even mentioning the obvious fact that Babbitt died in service of the bogus cause of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. […]

Wessel looks like a distinctly mediocre individual in the historical rear-view mirror, but the Nazis transformed his life and death into legend. In a campaign approved by Hitler and led by Goebbels, Nazi propaganda outlets depicted him as a hero. His funeral procession was viewed by 30,000 people who lined the streets of Berlin. He become the subject of a major motion picture and was honored by numerous monuments and books. A song Wessel had written for the SA the year before he died, later universally known as the “Horst Wessel Song,” became an unofficial anthem of the Third Reich: According to a 1934 law, every German citizen had to give the “Hitler greeting” upon hearing it.

As far as we know, Ashli Babbitt didn’t write a song and had no previous history of right-wing violence. But like Wessel, she cannot be described as a peaceful protester or even an overzealous advocate for a dubious cause. She died in a violent attack against democracy, as part of the first serious effort in American history to overturn an election by force. She died based on the lies of a would-be authoritarian dictator, the first American president to resist leaving office after losing an election. Her death was a personal tragedy, no doubt. But now the cynical movement that sent her to die in the Capitol wants to exploit that tragedy by turning her into a martyr for fascism. We’ve seen that before, and we’ve seen where that can lead — to a place even darker than the Twilight Zone.

The GOP has no substance left and it stands for nothing. It is the party of grievance and misinformation. It is the Cult of Trump.