A little more than a week after Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Ohio state Sen. George Lang was warming up the crowd ahead of a speech from Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), when he started idly vamping about how the country might need a civil war.
“I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country — and it will be saved,” Lang said Monday. “It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind, and if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like… Bikers for Trump on our side.”
Lang later wrote that he “regretted” the remark, which was made “in the excitement of the moment on stage.”
His own pangs of conscience aside, Lang’s comments aren’t an isolated occurrence — Trump and his allies have been musing about political violence and the possibility of civil war for years, even as experts warn that America’s increasing political polarization puts the country at risk of such scenarios.
Only a few weeks before Lang’s on-stage comments, footage emerged of Shelby Busch, chair of Arizona’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, threatening to “lynch” an official in charge of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most-populous county, where Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020.
“If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him,” Busch said, in a video that Richer, who is himself a Republican, posted online. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country. And so, I want to make that clear when we talk about what it means to unify.” (Busch later told the Washington Post she was making “a joke.”)
Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser, repeatedly invoked the prospect of war in June, while addressing a Turning Point Action convention for young conservative activists. “Are we at war?” he asked. “Is this a political war to the knife?” (According to CNN, this strange, oddly-specific phrase is associated with “the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes in the years before the Civil War.”)
“Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024?” Bannon went on to ask the conference’s attendees. “It’s very simple: victory or death!”
The same month, Mark Robinson, the GOP’s candidate for governor in North Carolina, was speaking about the need to extinguish political enemies — “wicked people,” and “people who have evil intent” — when he told supporters gathered in a church that “some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!” Robinson, who was later given a primetime speaking slot at the RNC.
The list goes on. Last year, Georgia state Sen. Colton Moore floated the possibility of civil war in an interview with Bannon’s podcast, the War Room. “We need to be taking action right now. Because if we don’t, our constituencies are going to be fighting it in the streets,” Moore said. “I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle. I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so.”
Kandiss Taylor, a Republican who ran for governor in Georgia, invoked civil war when reacting to Donald Trump’s indictment over his efforts to overturn the election there. “This is treason,” Taylor said. “This is war, and I hope and pray it gets resolved before we use guns. I really do. I do not want to see bloodshed in America, but we’re at war right now: a war for our freedom.”
Asked by Tucker Carlson about the possibility civil war might break out here in the U.S. a little less than a year ago, Trump himself spoke warmly of Jan. 6 — the day his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election results — calling it “the most beautiful day” some of his supporters had ever experienced.
“You know, Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they don’t report it properly. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken [to] before,” Trump told Tucker Carlson. “A very small group of people went down there. And then there are a lot of scenarios that we can talk about. But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced. There was love and that there was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love… And I’ve also never seen simultaneously, and from the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.”
Pressed directly about the potential for open conflict, Trump demurred. “I don’t know, because I don’t know what, you know — I can say this: There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen,” Trump said. “That’s probably a bad combination.”
From Rolling Stone US
