At a political speech in Montana Thursday night, Donald J. Trump took a moment to speak highly of the state’s Republican congressman, Greg Gianforte.
"Greg is smart and, by the way, never wrestle him. Never. You understand that?" the president said, laughing as he physically acted out the scene two years ago in which Gianforte body-slammed a reporter to the ground, breaking his glasses and sending him to the hospital. "Any guy that can do a body slam — he's my kind of guy!"
And the crowd went wild.
Let’s address this first on the primitive grounds on which Trump celebrates it. Gianforte is considerably larger than the journalist whom he attacked during the 2016 campaign. Multiple witnesses say that Gianforte jumped the smaller man, out of the blue and without warning, slamming him to the ground in response to a question about health care that Gianforte did not want to answer.
Even in the macho world in which Trump imagines himself a player, that’s pathetic. That is not an act of bravery; that is cheap and it is cowardly. It would be cowardly on an elementary school playground or in a John Wayne western, and it is even more so in adult life.
And let’s be clear: What Trump celebrated Thursday night was not metaphorical violence or mere rhetoric. It is not Eric Holder telling a Democratic audience in Georgia that “if they go low, we kick them,” then going on to say that “I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate. We don’t do anything illegal.”
No, this is violence as an actual physical act, held up to be emulated.
Decent people do not do that. A civilized society does not tolerate that or celebrate that, nor should its leaders. A grown-up, 55-year-old man who resorts to unprovoked physical violence in a professional setting, as Gianforte did, ought to be ashamed of himself, as should anyone who tries to elevate him as a role model.
The notion that those who can impose themselves on others physically have some innate right to do so, just because they can -- that is the logic of those who descended upon Charlottesville. That is the logic of fascism. If that is where we are headed, where this president seeks to take us, then we are going to a dark place.
From their very beginnings, the purpose of government, of politics, of the law and the courts has been to give us an alternative to brute violence as a means to settle disagreements. The law and politics attempt to resolve things on the basis of what is right, what is fair, what is best and what is just, not based on who is the strongest or most vicious. It is about protecting the weak from the strong, whether we’re talking about an elderly woman getting her purse snatched on the street by some punk or a small businessperson getting cheated by a corporation.
The ability -- and willingness -- to settle disputes without violence, on some basis other than raw power, is the first, most minimal standard of what it means to be civilized. And in his personal and public lives, that is a constraint that Trump at best accepts grudgingly. His celebration of Gianforte’s cowardly act is directly related to his rampage-and-ruin business style, his expressed admiration for murderous dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and his reluctance to condemn Saudi Arabia for its brutal assassination and dismembering of dissident journalist Jamal Kashoggi.
There’s an audience for that, clearly. There always has been and always will be, and in times such as these, we see who that audience is. But it is absolutely antithetical to everything that this country was founded upon and has claimed to champion, both here at home and in our relations with other nations. If that is what we are to become, it is very different from what we have been.
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