Roughly two weeks before Election Day 2018, a man was charged with sending pipe bombs to Donald Trump’s critics, including several prominent Democratic leaders. The then-Republican president responded soon after in ways that revealed his character in unfortunate ways.
As we discussed at the time, Trump responded to the bomb plot — which he dismissed as “bomb stuff“ — by lashing out at Democrats, including those targeted by the bomber. Asked if he was prepared to “tone down” his rhetoric under the circumstances, Trump replied, “I could really tone it up.”
Two years later, ahead of Election Day 2020, law enforcement announced charges against a group of radicals who plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Just as he’d done two years earlier, Trump responded by lashing out at the Michigan Democrat.
This year, almost four years to the day after the pipe bomb plot was exposed, a man allegedly broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and violently attacked her husband, fracturing his skull with a hammer and putting Paul Pelosi in intensive care. True to form, Trump is responding in a decidedly Trumpian way.
Initially, even as some GOP leaders denounced the violence and extended well wishes to the Pelosi family, the former president said literally nothing. A few days after the attack, Trump finally got around to acknowledging what had transpired, saying, “With Paul Pelosi, that’s a terrible thing, with all of them it’s a terrible thing. Look at what’s happened to San Francisco generally. Look at what’s happening in Chicago. It was far worse than Afghanistan.”
Given conditions in Afghanistan, the comments were plainly absurd.
Yesterday, as Politico reported, the former president did what he nearly always does.
Former President Donald Trump has joined a chorus of conservative voices who have shared baseless conspiracy theories about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. During an appearance on the Chris Stigall radio show that aired Tuesday morning in Philadelphia, Trump called the attack a “sad situation” but questioned if there was more to the story being detailed by law enforcement.
“Wow, it’s — weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks. Probably, you and I are better off not talking about it. The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out so it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out. I don’t know, you hear the same things I do,” Trump said.
The Republican added, “It’s a lot of bad stuff and I’m not a fan of Nancy Pelosi, but what’s going on there is very sad. The whole thing is crazy, and if there’s even a little bit of truth to what’s being said. The window was broken in and it was strange the cops were standing there practically from the moment it all took place. So, you’re going to have to explain that to your audience, including me.” His initial silence made Trump appear callous. What he ended up saying yesterday made him look quite a bit worse. The most obvious problem with the former president’s rhetoric is that it’s ridiculously wrong. As a factual matter, the details Trump presented as true are contradicted, not only by revelations released by law enforcement, but also by literal camera footage from the Capitol Police’s security cameras, which prove Trump’s claims false. But just as notable is the fact that the former president could’ve simply acted like a decent human being. It would’ve required very little effort for him to simply condemn the attack, denounce political violence, and extend best wishes to the victim and his family. It would’ve been easy, and it would’ve suggested to the world that he still has some sense of right and wrong. But Trump — for the third consecutive election cycle — couldn’t quite clear the low bar.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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