Commentary by Jerry Lanson
On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared Donald Trump to the snapping turtle she had as child (“he’s mean when he’s cornered”). Perhaps she should also have compared him to a stray Tom cat, who barres his fangs when backed against an alley wall.
In recent days, the news has not been kind to Trump. Confronted by a nearly unanimous congressional vote to release the Epstein files, by rifts among his MAGA faithful and by a series of polls showing his percentile support descending among voters into the mid- to upper 30s, he’s lashed out viciously.
In one incident, he pointed his finger in the face of a Bloomberg reporter and called her “Piggy.” In another, when an ABC News correspondent asked him about the murder of reporter Jamal Khashoggi and also asked why he didn’t release the Epstein files on his own, he called her “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” He then suggested that the chair of the Federal Communication Commission consider revoking the network’s broadcast license.
And when two Democratic U.S. senators and four representatives, all former veterans or intelligence officers, put out a YouTube video reminding members of the military that they should not follow illegal orders, Trump called their action treasonous -- and initially suggested that perhaps they should be hanged.
That same day, The Washington Post broke a story saying that the US Coast Guard, under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, would no longer consider the swastika to be a form of hate speech.
This much is clear. If overtones of 1930s fascism served as a steady backdrop to the start of Trump’s second presidential term, the month of November has stripped away any pretense of subtlety.
His threat against Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and four members of the House of Representatives strikes me as the most unhinged and frightening of his words and actions this week, though, oddly, the news media largely chose to focus most of their reporting elsewhere.
The six Congress members produced their video, titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” to directly address members of the military and intelligence communities. Its message is straightforward, but avoids any specific examples (the military has been called in, among other things, to play a role in highly controversial immigration actions as well as the controversial sinking of vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific).
In the video, the six Congress members take turns delivering this script:
“We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they tell their audience. “… This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens …..
“Our laws are clear – you can refuse illegal orders, you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate our law or our Constitution. We know this is hard [but] … now more than ever the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution and who we are as Americans. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up the ship.”
On Thursday night, Trump reacted harshly. He posted on Truth Social, branding the lawmakers’ message as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Slotkin told NBC she subsequently received “hundreds and hundreds” of threats. She now has round-the-clock protection from the Capitol Police, the Detroit News reported.
Though Trump stepped back from his initial death threat, he has kept up the heat. Late Saturday he wrote that the lawmakers “SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW,” Mediate reports.
Yet this crazed tirade against lawmakers exercising their freedom of speech to talk to Americans about upholding their oaths under the Constitution has elicited a highly muted response from mainstream media.
The authors of the political web site electoral-vote.com wrote that not a single major news website chose Trump’s threat as its top story the next day – from The New York Times to CNN.
“Not a one [of their lead stories] has anything to do with Trump pulling a Mussolini/Hitler/Franco and calling for leading members of the opposition party to be put to death,” electoral-vote.com noted. “The story is not found lower on the page(s), either. It has completely disappeared.”
Added the site, “When the President of the United States calls for violence against someone, all it takes is for one person to take it seriously.”
On Friday, one of the House members, Air Force veteran and Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan put it this way in a CNN interview:
“I never in a million years thought I’d be talking to you tonight about the fact that the president of the United States has called for my death by hanging for sedition and treason. And called for it because I and a number of other people published a video that says you have to follow the law.”
She has reported receiving bomb threats to her office.
Trump, meanwhile, got his usual rubber-stamp support from House Speaker Mike Johnson and only slightly more restrained support from the GOP Senate leadership. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt predictably defended Trump’s tweet, calling the Democratic members of Congress “seditious traitors.” Trump himself took a half-step backwards, telling Fox News radio that “I’m not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble.”
In the video, Sen. Kelly, who served in the Navy and is a former astronaut, says: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”
It is a statement of fact.
On Friday, the day after The Washington Post reported that the Coast Guard would no longer classify the swastika as a hate symbol, the paper reported that the Coast Guard, “in a stunning and hasty reversal” spurred by “furious backlash,” would continue to classify both the swastika and noose as prohibited hate symbols.
But what comes next in the president’s ongoing sedition sideshow remains unclear.
Kelly, for his part, made clear he will not be cowed.
Trump, he said this weekend, is “going to try to intimidate us because he … didn’t like what we said… I think what any other president would have done is they would have retweeted that video and said two words, ‘of course.’ And maybe followed up with ‘of course members of the military should not follow illegal or unlawful orders.’ That’s what we should expect from a commander in chief. But not this guy.”
Perhaps he should have added that any other free press would have covered the story more effectively.
“For any other president,” wrote electoral-vote.com, “this [story] would dominate the news for weeks, if not months.”
Republished by permission from Lanson’s Substack From the Grassroots.