Noah Rothman:
The Florida senator spoke to the press after a now infamous Trump rally in downtown Chicago was mobbed and infiltrated by organized Black Lives Matter and pro-Bernie Sanders protesters. For hours, broadcast on live television, America watched as this boiling caldron of vitriol sporadically broke down into bouts of physical violence. It was Trump, not the Chicago Police Department, as he claimed, who made the decision to shut down that event before things got even further out of hand. This dynamic, one in which Trump protester and supporter square off amid the tensions of imminent violence, has come to characterize many Trump gatherings since Friday. The candidate himself is now a secondary attraction at his own traveling roadshow. The latest titillation toward which his fans gravitate is the prospect of watching blood spill and of coming dangerously close to the action.
Asked about this deeply regrettable spectacle, Marco Rubio made it perfectly clear who was to blame. “This is a man who, in rallies, has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he’ll pay their legal fees,”Rubio said. “And I think the media bears some responsibility.” He added that Trump is responding to a perverse set of incentives in which the free media coverage from which his campaign has benefited is only sustained so long as he can continually increase the ante, and that is a recipe for disaster.
“This is what a culture and a society look like when everyone says whatever the heck they want,” he added. “If I’m angry, it gives me the right to say or do anything I want. Well, there are other people that are angry, too. And if they speak out and say whatever they want, the result is it all breaks down. It’s called chaos. It’s called anarchy.”
Rubio noted, as have others, that many of the liberal protesters who descended on Trump rallies were a professional sort of agitator, but he was also clear that the tensions that typify Trump events are the result of a conscious calculation on the candidate’s part. The design of many of these protesters is to provoke a confrontation and present themselves to a sympathetic media environment as the victims of a dangerous movement. This is not a new tactic, but past targets of it have previously been wise enough to avoid giving their harassers precisely what they want. In Trump’s case, violent agitation is meeting with violent agitation. And it is happening repeatedly, across the country, and only at Donald Trump’s events.
“Forget about the election for a moment,” he added. “This boiling point that we have now reached has been fed largely by the fact that we have a frontrunner in my party that basically justifies physically assaulting people who disagree with you.”
The Florida senator observed that a supporter at a recent Trump rally “sucker punched” an African-American protester on camera and, after his release following arrest, promised next time to kill him. Rubio noted that Donald Trump has not condemned his supporter, nor has he offered any thoughts for the man he attacked. Instead, on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Trump revealed that he was looking into making good on his promise to pay the legal costs associated with the execution of violence in the name of Trump. This is a formula for tyranny, and it is one that Donald Trump is skillfully exploiting. He sows the seeds of disorder and will soon present himself as the only candidate that can contain the forces he has unleashed.
I had initially assumed that Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric was simply a strong-arm political tactic — that Trump campaign operatives threatening chaos, or worse, was a strategy designed to intimidate the Republican Party into giving their candidate the nomination at a potentially contested convention. That might have been the original plan, but it’s not any longer. The violence Trump has stoked has arrived months ahead of schedule. It suggests that this is a phenomenon over which Trump no longer has full control, and the cooler heads that we all expected to prevail are still largely silent about it or positioning themselves to benefit from it.
