Late last year, FBI Director Kash Patel spoke to reporters about the suspect in the Capitol Hill pipe-bombing case and declared, “[W]hen you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack our nation’s capital, you attack the very being of our way of life. And this FBI and this Department of Justice stand here to tell you that we will always refute it and combat it.”
Observers noticed one flaw in Patel’s rhetoric: Jan. 6 rioters attacked “our institutions of legislation” and “our nation’s capital,” and they ended up with rewards from Donald Trump.
This came up repeatedly during the first year of the president’s second term, as administration officials denounced violence against law enforcement while also celebrating the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, many of whom had been sent to prison for assaulting police officers, only to be put back on the streets thanks to Trump’s pardons.
All of this came to mind anew in recent days as prominent Republicans have responded to the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which an armed gunman attempted to breach on Saturday night.
“This is not a third-world country,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “This is not a country where you change hands by bullets. You change hands by ballots.”
The GOP senator’s comment came on the heels of similar rhetoric from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt:
We can and we should have fierce disagreement in this country. As you all know, we disagree often, myself in this role and all of you in the news media, but those disagreements must remain peaceful. Debating, peaceful protesting and voting are how we need to settle disagreements, not bullets.
At face value, the comments from Graham and Leavitt were unambiguously correct. In fact, their rhetoric was eerily familiar because Democrats, scholars, progressives and other proponents of democracy used nearly identical language when Trump invited a group of radicalized followers to the nation’s capital after his 2020 defeat, filled them with conspiratorial lies, told his mob, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” deployed his followers to Capitol Hill and even used social media to add fuel to the fire during the violence.
It was at that point when it was the president’s opponents who were eager to remind Trump and his allies that Americans are supposed to resolve our differences through debate, peaceful protests and elections, not political violence.
For Graham and Leavitt to try borrow the left’s script reflects the latest in a series of failures of self-awareness.
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