On Tuesday afternoon I stopped mid-task, stunned, when I saw the subject line of a new fundraising email from Donald Trump: “They were authorized to shoot me!”
However, on Thursday morning, when I received the email that made Trump cry: “I almost escaped death,” I understood his scam. My fear, however, is that his staunchest supporters are not, and that they may be provoked not to send money but to take up arms in his name.
Is happened, you know.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Trump doesn't care. For several days, he and his MAGA echo chamber made up a lie: the “Pants on Fire” friendly, according to Politifact calculations – from documents recently revealed in the Florida classified documents criminal case against Trump. Falsely referencing boilerplate language in FBI agents' plans to search Mar-a-Lago in 2022, they claimed that President Biden's Justice Department had authorized Trump's possible assassination.
“It has just been revealed that the Biden Justice Department was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid at Mar-a-Lago,” he lamented in the Tuesday email and on his social media sites. “You know they're just eager to do the unthinkable. “Joe Biden was locked and loaded, ready to take me out and put my family in danger.”
He repeated the claim in Thursday's post and his minions amplified it. “Were they going to shoot?” [Secret Service] “So President Trump, Melania and Barron too???,” Congressional nutcase Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, he asked himself on X (formerly Twitter) for his more than 3 million followers. Sean Hannity, Fox News host struck down in prime time. And the Republican National Committee enraged that the FBI’s deadly force authority “takes the Biden administration’s use of the law as a weapon to a whole new level.”
As far as Trump's lies go, this was a lie that crossed all lines: A former president, now the presumptive nominee of one of our two major parties, alleged that the sitting president's administration conspired to possibly kill him. That statement should not have been met with a collective Trump-will-be-Trump shrug.
However, that's pretty much what happened. As a headline On Thursday, Bulwark, the website of anti-Trump conservatives, read: “Donald Trump is lying about an assassination attempt and no one cares.”
Almost nothing was heard from either party in Congress, except the MAGA Republicans who spread the lie. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley tweeted a clip from 2022 in which Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland said he had “personally approved” the decision to obtain a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, and Hawley added that perhaps Garland “would like to come to Congress and explain all of this under oath to the American people.” . “
I'm sure Garland wouldn't mind at all. And yet it took a question from a reporter at the Justice Department on Thursday before the attorney general, the alleged head of Trump's potential death squad, responded to the smear.
“That accusation is false.” he said, “and it is extremely dangerous.” He The FBI's strength wording was standard operational stuff., Garland added, same protocol. that was in effect when agents searched Biden's home for classified documents in early 2023. What he could have added is that the FBI knew Trump would not be at Mar-a-Lago when agents showed up.
The attorney general was clearly prepared for the question. But his measured and belated denial was not enough. Only the president can get the attention he demanded by refuting Trump's reckless lie.
I understand that Biden does not want to react to all of Trump's fallacies. He does not want to give oxygen to the constant bombings, grant them the respect of a reaction or further exhaust Americans tired of drama. But in a nation where many of us have memories of political assassinations and assassination attempts, where domestic terrorism is “metastasizing throughout the country”, according to the FBI, and political violence is rising, Trump's obscenely fake news deserved a stronger, faster pushback.
From anyone other than Trump — imagine any living former president — the claim that the government would assassinate his political rivals would prompt widespread media coverage, a police fight, and congressional investigations. (Where are House Republicans so eager to impeach Biden? Don't they believe Trump?)
It is a measure of Trump's widely perceived antics that the nation practically yawned when the former president shouted in all caps: “BIDEN'S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” What could be more illustrative of complacency than Nikki Haley's decision to betray her anti-Trump Republican supporters and finally announce on Wednesday, amid lies about the assassination, that she would (wait for it) be voting for Trump?
The danger is that not the entire nation yawns. Polls and testimony show that Trump's staunch supporters (an overwhelming majority of Republicans) believe his lies. They believe Biden stole his re-election in 2020, that Biden runs a crime family from inside the White House, and that Biden is orchestrating Trump's criminal prosecutions. Countless January 6 defendants have testified about the power of Trump's words to incite his violent acts.
Why wouldn't some of those true believers believe that Biden's Justice Department would shoot Trump dead? And what could they do about it?
Biden will never convince MAGA loyalists that Trump is lying about anything. But for the sake of us not–American MAGA, he I should not have ignored such a defamatory and dangerous accusation. He should have argued forcefully why Trump's lies could invite violence and argued, for the sake of his campaign, that anyone who told those lies is unfit for office.
The president missed his chance. But alas, Trump will surely provide him with another.
@jackiekcalmes
