Trump Is Responsible For Death Threats To Women Members Of Congress Who Oppose His Fascism

Reshaping the GOP by Nancy Ohanian

Last night, while Trump, was encouraging a chant-- "Send her home"-- at one of his trade-marked hate rallies, this one in North Carolina, Bernie was at dinner with Ilhan Omar and her daughter, at whom Trump's vitriol was aimed. A few hours later Bernie wrote that it was at the dinner that he and Ilhan first heard the news that thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally were chanting "send her back." Thursday, after Trump's advisors warned him that if he keeps up that kind of televised extremism, he would lose in 2020, Trump decided to throw his racist supporters under the bus. He told the White House reporters Thursday morning that the "send her back" chant Wednesday night-- which he could have easily stopped, instead of encouraging-- was not something he agrees with. "I was not happy with it. I disagree with it." What a liar!

Bernie's note continued that to his surprise, "Ilhan was pretty unfazed. Sadly, as she told me, she has been dealing with this kind of hatred and racism for a long time. And she knows, as we do, that Trump is a demagogue doing what he does best: dividing and conquering through hate. No; Trump won't talk about trying to throw 32 million Americans off their health care. He won't talk about his massive tax breaks for billionaires. He won't talk about his budget which called for huge cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And he certainly won't talk about how climate change is destroying the planet. But he will try to divide the country up based on the color of our skin, our religion, where we were born or our sexual orientation. Brothers and sisters: Now is the time, more than at any other moment in our lifetimes, to say NO to racism, NO to divisiveness, NO to the hatred that Trump is trying to foment. Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we.

Some congressional Republicans are starting to get frightened about Trump's pivot to extremism-- whether to take people's minds off his ties to child rapist Jeffrey Epstein or because he is determined to run on this as an actual platform. The none-too-bright new head of the NRCC, Tom Emmer-- their version of Cheri Bustos-- was mortified that the Trump crowd chants could lose the GOP dozens of seats next year. He told the media that he "didn’t watch the rally last night, but there’s no place for that kind of talk. I don’t agree with it."

Michael Krause, reporting for Politico, noted that hours before Trump arrived, his Greenville crowd "was ready for it and ready to ramp it up. More than three days after President Donald Trump triggered national outrage with tweets telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to 'go back' to the countries 'from which they came,' the feeling among the throng mustering in the sweltering heat at East Carolina University was that the president had ample rope before he even came close to offending them."

The best-selling MAGA merchandise, perfectly parroting and even amplifying his taunts on Twitter, indicated just how much latitude he enjoyed.

“LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.”

“LET ME HELP YOU PACK!”

“BUILD THE WALL DEPORT THEM ALL.”

...Inside, barely 15 minutes into his hour-and-a-half stemwinder, Trump gave the people what they wanted: “The four congresswomen,” he said. The capacity crowd in the venue of 8,000 seats booed on cue. And then Trump named the women, starting with the only one of them not born in this country. “Representative Ilhan Omar,” he enunciated. He talked about the Minnesota lawmaker originally from Somalia, and only her, for the better part of five minutes, portraying her, a U.S. citizen since she was 17, as an anti-Semitic, America-hating sympathizer of terrorists.

“Traitor!” someone shouted from high up in the crowd.

“Treason!” someone else yelled.

And then the chanting started.

“Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!”

If there had been any doubt about how Trump’s latest political gambit would be received-- had it inspired his supporters as much as it had enraged his opponents?-- it disappeared here. Earlier in the week, when Trump defended himself against charges of racism, insisting “many people agree with me,” it was crowds like these he almost certainly had in mind. But until right then and there, he hadn’t heard directly from them-- a live audience feeding back direct proof that this was something he could keep running on.

This is and always has been the engine of Trump’s political ascent and appeal-- not just perpetual, calculated conflict, but particularly and specifically race-laced foils and feuds. His proto-candidacy was birtherism. The crux of the announcement of his 2016 candidacy: Mexican rapists. The ongoing battle cry: “Build that wall!” And while he filed for reelection the day of his inauguration, and his first official 2020 rally was a month ago in Orlando, Florida, this past half-week capped by Wednesday night felt like the truer, more telling start.

...And he had to hear what I heard, seated in the press pen. Trump stood at the center of the stage, under a giant American flag, and that blunt chant, unscripted and spontaneous, rained down, a newfangled three-syllable shiv. Television clips fail to convey its intensity. It was, by far, the most visceral, guttural sound of the night.

...The longer he talked, the more he told mostly uncheckable tales in which people called him sir. A smattering of policy squeezed between much more rousing personal asides and attacks, the speech was a sine wave of energy peaks and troughs. It was the extemporaneous product of an attention-seeking, room-reading savant, an instinctual gauger and tweaker and torquer of crowds, who understands the ebb and flow of their appetites, always aware of what line will get the biggest reaction.

Oddly for a campaign rally, one of those troughs came when he finally mentioned the Democrats who might be his actual opponent come next November. His invocations were brief, halfhearted, practically parenthetical. He called Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.” He called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” He called Bernie Sanders “desperate.” He called Kamala Harris “a new one that knocked the hell out of Biden during the debate.” He called Pete Buttigieg “a beauty” who “runs a failed city” before poking fun at his name (“Boot-edge-edge!”). He called all of them “sad.”

The real takeaway, though, was some 20 minutes in. He spent far, far more time on the quartet of congresswomen he labeled “vicious” “extremists”-- first Omar, and then Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and then Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a hard-to-miss chronology that prioritized the two Muslims before shifting to AOC (whom he pointedly called “Cortez”), and finally Pressley. He paused to listen to the chants about Omar and let others in the arena do the same.

Vote for Trump next year, the president suggested, or vote for them.

“The choice for every American,” he said, “has never been more clear.”

I would imagine that Pelosi has requested Secret Service protection for Ilhan by now, perhaps all four of them. Bobby Rush (D-IL): "It’s crystal clear to me that her life is in imminent danger. He has threatened the safety of a member of Congress. That takes this to a whole different level." Rush is a phony. If he gave a damn he would have voted for impeachment. He didn't. Neither did Ben Ray Lujan, a Pelosi lap dog who said blithely, "It’s bad enough that the president didn’t stop the chant last night. But he started it. It’s instilling fear, it’s going to instill violence."

Yesterday the Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay reported that crackpot ant-vaxxer Trumpist Darryl Varnum threatened to kill Frederica Wilson (D-FL), who has been a Trump target for years. Varnum is a Pentagon cybersecurity contractor and has been charged with threatening to kill a member of Congress over the introduction of a bill that would require public schools to vaccinate children. He called her on June 28 and left a voicemail threatening to kill her if she introduced the bill.

“I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill. I swear,” Varnum’s voicemail began. “I will fucking come down and kill your fucking ass. And you’re a Congressperson, that’s fine. I hope the fucking FBI, CIA and everybody else hears this shit.”

“This is the United States of America, bitch. Get the fuck out,” the voicemail continued. “I’ll tell you what I’ll come down to Miami bitch. I’ll fuck you up. Like the Cubans don’t even know.” 

...On his Facebook page, Varnum compared The Vaccinate All Children Act to the Holocaust-- a common trope used by vaccine skeptics. “I’m done with this bullshit. Time to step up or ship out,” he wrote. In a comment on that post, Varnum added, “All of our guns are next. Been trying for years!”

According to the complaint, Varnum’s wife previously told police that he owns “numerous guns.” He has registered just one: a .45 caliber Ruger pistol. His wife’s statement came in the course of another law enforcement encounter in 2015. Carroll County sheriff's deputies responded to a call from Varnum’s wife, who reported that her husband was having “behavioral issues.” When police arrived, an intoxicated Varnum had holed up in his garage with a rifle and a bottle of vodka, insisting that Taliban militants were en route to his house.

Police said Varnum was “cooperative and non-violent” during that interaction, and he was transported to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.

But even after that, he was still employed by the Pentagon-- through the Defense Information Systems Agency-- as a "a senior cyber systems engineer." Trump has been a lunatic fringe vocal anti-vaxxer: