The Road to Splitsville RE-RE-RE-RE/ RE-RE-RE-RE VENGE (JUST A LITTLE BIT)

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Thus far, in The Road to Splitsville, the dominant theme has been something along the lines of “the conservative/red states will deliberately seek a ‘divorce’ from the liberal/blue states, because they’re a bunch of big fat idiots and religious lunatics who don’t know how miserable their post-Split lives will be.” The divorce metaphor seems appropriate: The bonds uniting the married couple have dissolved. The thrill, and even the tolerance, is gone. Each faces a better future if they separate.

But what if the Split comes about under duress and in a context of violence? What if husband and wife aren’t so much separating because “the marriage is no longer working,” but because one of them is trying to kill the other?

We ask because of a disturbing Substack posting by Georgetown prof Don Moynihan about terror, and its steady infusion, by Trump and Republicans, into our political—which is to say, public—life. Statistics aside (and they’re plenty damning), the piece doesn’t tell you anything you don’t sort-of already know, as much as synthesize a bunch of things into a truly fucked-up unified picture.

Trump, having lost in 2020, having been indicted on 93 felony counts up and down the Eastern seaboard, and now having been found guilty in 34 of them in New York, has fashioned his campaign around a single theme. It’s not “hope,” or “compassionate conservatism,” or even that old standby that conservatives offer the middle class because they can’t offer them anything else, “freedom.” It’s revenge.

Can you run a political campaign on that? You can if you’re Trump and MAGA. Sure, revenge only has meaning to someone who feels they have been wronged, which is to say, to someone who is, or thinks they are, a victim.  But ain’t that Trump all over? To a narcissist like Trump, any setback at all feels like an injustice. (Trump could lose a game of Parcheesi—after cheating at it—and whine that the outcome was “unfair.”) That’s why he and MAGA are True Love. Trump’s orc army is nothing if not a self-pitying multitude who feel victimized by liberals, gays, minorities, feminists, Jews, immigrants, the CDC, Big Grocery, Taylor Swift, and modernity itself.  

Unfortunately, it's a small step from “we all want revenge” to “let’s kill somebody” to “let’s YOU kill somebody.” Thus, says Moynihan:

Trumpism hastened a new version of right-wing politics, one that is not conservative nor libertarian in a meaningful sense, but one that urges the embrace of state power to go after their movement’s perceived enemies.

Terror is chiefly directed towards public officials who stand in the way of Trump’s goals and interests. These include other politicians, educators, public health officials, election officials, judges, and other parts of law enforcement.

And by “terror” he doesn’t mean, saying snarky things on Xitter. He means death threats. Speaking of those statistics:

·         A Princeton review of threats against local officials found that death threats are the most frequent type of threat recorded, representing 58% of all threats. The most frequent form of harassment was an invasion of privacy, which includes doxing, stalking, targeting friends or family members.

·         In 2021 there were no bomb threats reported by members of the American Library Association. In 2022 there were two. In 2023 there were 32.

Moynihan reviews eight “lessons” to be learned about terror, including “Trump and others have created a culture of permission for terror” and “Terror will be a feature of American public life regardless of the election outcome, but worse if Trump wins.” Which leads us to two good questions we asked in someone’s Comment section last week:

1. What will MAGA do when Trump loses in November?

2. What will MAGA do when Trump literally dies?

Yeah, yeah, we know: At first they’ll do what they always do when something happens that they don’t like. They’ll deny it happened. But then what? When it finally sinks in that they’ve lost their chance for revenge, will they…seek revenge? Or what if it never does sink in, and they remain deluded and gaslighted and brainwashed, as sure, in 2024, that Trump “really won” as they were (and still are) that he really won in 2020? Same deal—they’ll still be enraged by the whole-rest-of-the-world’s refusal to admit it. Which means they’ll feel ripped off and victimized. And they’ll want revenge.

Now, on the one hand, it seems reasonable to suggest that most of these Xitter death threats and pretentious “there will be blood” pronouncements on Facebook are empty, issued by cosplaying nitwits who hide behind nyms on social media and who are not “coming for” anybody. But on the other, we’ve never had a major candidate for office so openly contemptuous of law, so brazen in his call for “retribution,” and so pathologically shameless in his attacks on others. Trump assures MAGA, every day, that no outcome in which he loses (at the polls; in court) is legitimate, that the entire world is rigged against him and his followers. And of course they believe him. They believed the world was rigged against them before they ever heard of Trump.

Which brings us to stochastic terrorism—which, as every schoolchild knows, is “when a political or media figure publicly demonizes a person or group in a way that inspires supporters of the figure to commit a violent act against the target of the communication” (thank you, Wikipedia). Trump issues stochastic terrorist signals at every rally. And while right-wing racists, homophobes, and anti-Semites have been committing mass murders for decades, or maybe forever, there’s every reason to think that as Trump goes down, his army of frothers will rise up.

If that happens, the notion of giving these raving lunatics their own country might begin to seem rather appealing. And if, in the process, The Split functions as a sort of guidebook or instruction manual, and happens to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, perhaps while its authors take home a matching pair of Nobel Peace Prizes, don’t thank us. We live to serve.