My mother always told me that the law is whatever the person with the gun says it is.
She meant it both literally, in dealing with the police stops that are a part of every Black American’s life, and metaphorically, as a basic life lesson on the nature of power.
Americans like to think that kind of brutal understanding of law and power is beneath us. Freewheeling political speech, protected by the Constitution, makes political violence unnecessary and unlikely. Or so we think.
The truth is a gunman assassinated a sitting lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota last weekend on the day the president feted himself with a poorly attended, badly choreographed military parade. His condolences for the fallen were perfunctory, especially for a man who spends words like he spends other people’s money. And when a reporter asked him if he would call Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, he was flippant: “Why would I call him? The guy doesn’t have a clue.”
Sometimes violent political speech is obvious, like the president calling former Representative Liz Cheney a war hawk who should know what it feels like when “the guns are trained on her face.” But sometimes violent political speech is not what is said but what isn’t said. Or even the way that it isn’t said. It was evident in President Trump’s insistence that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021 were “very special,” instead of violent insurrectionists. It was clear, too, in his callous response to last weekend’s assassinations, an obvious case of the dangerous escalation of political violence.
A culture of fear shrouds this administration from the consequences of its actions. Trump taunts. He threatens. He hides his violent language behind humor that’s less funny than plausibly deniable. His behavior sets the tone for greedy political attention hogs. There’s no shortage of them. They curry his favor because they want his power for themselves. I’m not just talking about politicians and pundits. Online, loyalists act out a presidential vision of power by harassing and dehumanizing those he marks as ugly, stupid, lazy, fat and generally subhuman.
Trump is the Republican Party. That is settled. His violent talk is, then, the official political communication strategy of the ruling party and its followers. And that ruling party is stripping this country for parts.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argued this year in Foreign Affairs that many political observers misunderstand how autocracy can look in a mature democracy. The administrative and electoral bureaucracy can and likely will continue to function. Instead, institutional and democratic failure would involve tilting the outcomes of normal democratic processes in favor of one party while grinding down opposition with a mix of retribution and fear. By that definition, our institutions are fracturing before our very eyes. Nowhere is that more evident than in our broken Congress.
In a recent conversation we had on “The Opinions,” my colleague David French suggested that Senate conservatives won’t act because they’re are afraid of Trump and his acolytes. He echoed what I have heard from local civil servants. During the last election, a retired woman at my polling station bristled with demure efficiency. As I waited in line to vote, she told me that she had been a poll watcher for decades without incident. That year, her grandchildren were afraid for her safety. Their fear did not deter her, but it’s not hard to imagine that a similar lurking worry did deter many others. I cheered her courage at the time. Today, I would think about the assassinations in Minnesota and the violent detainment of Senator Alex Padilla of California and I might echo her grandchildren.
The erosion of political norms has driven a Republican-controlled Congress out of the business of checking the executive branch, essentially handing its power over to a man who styles himself a king. In 2020, the Democratic senator from Ohio at the time, Sherrod Brown, wrote in this newspaper that congressional Republicans feared retribution from Trump so much that they had abandoned their duty to the public. Mitt Romney, then a senator from Utah, went further. In a speech explaining his decision during Trump’s first impeachment trial to vote to convict the president of abuse of power, Romney said he expected to hear “abuse from the president and his supporters” because he had voted his conscience. It appears that he was right. Conservative media thrashed him, and eventually there were threats to his life, and he feared for his family members’ lives.
What Brown and Romney pointed out back then was fear, yes, but I’ve often found that in discussing why so many Republicans remain reticent, many of us merely gesture — or worse, roll our eyes — at what exactly they are so afraid of.
There’s the targeted harassment, for one thing. Trump’s playbook, which is now the G.O.P. playbook, has long been to ruthlessly attack perceived enemies with ridicule and reputational punishment. Academics have a term for the way a coterie of followers will take up these attacks as their own cause — “networked harassment”; it’s the internet’s way of making doxxing people and spreading nasty rumors about them cheap, easy and undetectable. The term is precise, but he jargon can obscure the violence at work.
The online part of violent political speech makes the violence seem twee, as if it was something teenage girls do on TikTok. But online harassment ruins lives and breaks people by socially isolating them. We should have more respect for teenage girls now that the president of the United States is enforcing fealty using his own burn book.
The fact that harassment happens “online” makes it more violent, not less. Time does not exist online. Once upon a time, when a rumor threatened your ability to do your job or live your life offline, it was horrible. It was also bound to time and place. You could move or graduate or wait for people to get bored. But once a targeted harassment campaign goes virtual, it never ends. Every time someone shares the meme, the picture, the headline, the doctored video, the screenshot of your address, the clock starts again.
Worse, people diminish the harassment because it’s just words. That’s bad enough when the one attacking you is a nameless troll or a private citizen. When it is the president, words are weapons.
There was a vigorous debate before the last election about fascism. Experts on authoritarianism argued whether what was expected of President Trump’s second administration — a government packed with loyalists, a weaponized civil service, an inescapable chaos fashioned by executive orders and social media quips — fit the definition of fascism. I won’t rehash that debate here. History has the last word on such things. But I do remember that a flashpoint of the debate was that the president did not have and probably would not be able to stand up a secret police force.
This was a critical point. Most authoritarian regimes are marked by political violence. It’s a metric on the scales that rank freedom and democracy across countries. At the time, I remarked that people’s definition of political violence felt outdated. Threatening the sitting speaker of the House by mocking her intellectual abilities and running $50 million worth of attack ads that demonize her might just be talk. But when dehumanizing political speech becomes a tailored political message that’s amplified so much that it feels inescapable, eventually a lone wolf is going to listen.
Would a conspiracy-obsessed man really have broken into Representative Nancy Pelosi’s home and beaten her husband’s skull with a hammer if not for the inescapable online narrative that cast her as a unique villain to the American people?
Even then, the violence of scale that the internet enables and that a charismatic autocrat would eventually weaponize was difficult to see clearly. Never before in human history has there been a digital environment where political speech can be filtered through an algorithm that incentivizes extra outrage and uses mounds of data to send that message directly to the people who will be the most outraged about it.
In other words, maybe the Gestapo won’t be jackbooted thugs but keyboard warriors. And maybe the keyboard warriors are worse.
For one thing, keyboard warriors are almost impossible to trace. The threats can come from anywhere. When you are the victim, the threats feel as if they’re coming from everywhere. You may never know which colleague posted your address on the internet or which neighbor anonymously reported your undocumented status to ICE. But, say, when those immigration agents show up at your asylum hearing, you can bet that at least some of them will be wearing masks and hiding their identities, potentially because they don’t want to be shamed online and in person. Their behavior demonstrates that words do indeed matter. It would be a lot harder to roll over civil liberties without the comfort of anonymity and a pervasive atmosphere of fear.
I don’t know if that’s fascism. I do know that it is absolutely political violence. Those distinctions probably don’t matter.
What matters is political violence is here and it is working. Congressional Republicans fear the sort of retribution that would not simply oust them from office but would also threaten their lives and those of their staff members and their families. But unlike the rest of us, they have the luxury of hiding: All they have to do is abandon their constitutional duty and damn those of us who can’t hide — outspoken Democrats, immigrants, Black people, trans people.
It is hard to empathize with Republicans who refuse to do their duty out of fear, when so many of us have no choice but to live with that fear each day. But to acknowledge the true scope of the violence that now governs our nation, we must try.
Otherwise, the anonymous mob that really holds the gun will forever make the law.
Source photograph by Chris Stein/Getty Images
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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