“Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump,” Mattis wrote. “His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”
This is from Lara Seligman, “Mattis blames Trump for inciting ‘mob rule’“, Politico, January 6, 2020.
Because I didn’t watch or read Trump’s speech, I made a mistake I make too often: I took people’s word for what Trump said.
I wonder if my Hoover colleague Jim Mattis did too.
What I’ve always liked about Ann Althouse, an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, is that she’s independent: she thinks for herself.
Professor Althouse read the whole transcript, looking for where Trump incited the crowd. She listed the 7 most violence-inciting statements in Trump’s speech. Check the list of 7 and see if you can see “incitement” or “fomenting.” Or possibly she missed something. So go to the transcript and see if you can see something important she missed.
Here are 3 of her 7:
7. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
6. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal…. We will not let them silence your voices.
5. The Republicans have to get tougher. You’re not going to have a Republican party if you don’t get tougher.
READER COMMENTS
Lliam Munro
Jan 9 2021 at 1:18am
I’m not going to bother to read the whole transcript, but I’ve read her list and even assuming that there’s nothing else in the full transcript more inflammatory than that listed, I disagree with you.
Context matters, and and in this context failing to de-escalate and emphasising toughness and refusal to concede and repeating his nonsense about a stolen election is incitement.
Variant
Jan 9 2021 at 1:24am
Would you say the same of the numerous left wing politicians who made similar statements about rioters last summer?
Lliam Munro
Jan 9 2021 at 1:39am
Yes.
andy
Jan 9 2021 at 4:43am
I don’t see this as an incitement to violence. Why do you think you are right and I’m wrong?
Lliam Munro
Jan 9 2021 at 4:48am
For example, let us imagine a bunch of Westboro Baptist Church members were to turn up to a gay bar wielding baseball bats and are greeted at the door by their pastor who has for years been preaching hate against homosexuals and celebrating their deaths.
If having met them at the door, the pastor says, “homosexuality is an abomination; we need to be tougher; we must never back down”, can you seriously claim that the pastor is absolved of responsibility for the ensuing violence because he didn’t utter the words, “now go smash their skulls in”?
David Henderson
Jan 9 2021 at 7:21pm
In the hypothetical you give, I would agree that the pastor is inciting.
Note, though, what you had to do to get there. You had them with baseball bats outside a gay bar and the pastor seeing that they have baseball bats. Let’s say that Trump had seen people in his crowd carrying guns. Then I think we would be much closer to the idea that he incited.
Greg G
Jan 9 2021 at 7:53pm
Let’s say he really did see lots of people in the crowd wearing QAnon symbols and slogans. And let’s say this movement expects and supports a violent insurrection where Trump’s political opponents are arrested and imprisoned or executed for the purpose of keeping him in power.
Jerry Brown
Jan 9 2021 at 8:29pm
That guy with the fur and horns on his head had to be hard to miss in any crowd…
Lliam Munro
Jan 9 2021 at 11:28pm
The hypothetical establishes that he did not need to utter the words, “now go storm the capitol” in order to be guilty of incitement. So then the question is, given context, what could he have reasonably anticipated and what did he do to escalate or de-escalate?
In my view, given his months of dissembling about stolen elections, the frequent discussions of the potential for violence and the recent history of riots it was totally reasonable to expect violence if he continued to pour petrol on the embers. Which he did.
Tom G
Jan 11 2021 at 8:06am
Is he absolved of responsibility for the ensuing violence because he didn’t utter the words, “now go smash their skulls in”?
Some responsibility is NOT the same a criminally liable for inciting violence. He could have given up, and accepted the Dems stealing the election, which is what the cheating Dems want.
Trump has consistently been against violence, altho also supportive of peaceful protests. Like the annual March for Life, against the killing of innocent unwanted human fetal babies. Which Trump also addressed.
The outcome Trump wanted? Lots of peaceful people, news about the specific frauds to be actually investigated rather than covered-up; and, yes, he wanted Pence & other Reps to reject the EC votes from the fraud states.
Rule of Law means the same rules against behavior for all. No Capitol Police killed any of the 2018 Dems who stormed the Capitol in protest against Kavanaugh.
They shouldn’t have killed Ashli, either – who wasn’t even one of the two or three guys who were breaking the windows of the door where the protesters were, in violation of regulations.
Lawrence
Jan 11 2021 at 11:47am
If you ask for “context,” why not include as context the many times that Trump expressed his desire to see people act peacefully in his speech? To discount these instances is to tilt the board.
Jerry Brown
Jan 9 2021 at 1:47am
Like Lliam Munro says- context matters. And the first 30 minutes of that was a serious divergence from truth which any ordinary person can infer some motive.
I see Professor that you were very careful not to take any sort of position on this yourself in this post. That is disappointing to me to say the least.
john hare
Jan 9 2021 at 5:44am
I’ve talked to one person that watched the speech on television and followed the link. From my sample of one, and reading of the seven, I think it very possible to get people stirred up without it showing up in a transcript. As mentioned by several people above, context matters. While I doubt Trump expected what actually occurred, I think he is responsible for not understanding the possibility. Beyond that, I don’t have a strong position absent more facts.
I talked to one person in Georgia that is fairly certain that Trump cost the two Senators the run off election with the endless fraud and theft rhetoric. He knows of two people personally that normally vote Republican that didn’t bother to vote specifically because they were convinced that the election was rigged and their votes didn’t matter.
David Henderson
Jan 9 2021 at 7:22pm
Your first paragraph addresses the issue I raised. It looks as if the only sure way for me to judge is to go beyond the transcript and actually watch the speech.
john hare
Jan 10 2021 at 4:12am
I wouldn’t want to be the one to inflict watching the speech on you. I’m certainly not going to waste an hour of my life on it absent strong reason/motivation. I.E. I would only do it if I though I could make a useful difference.
O.T. On a job yesterday I heard from his step-father that a guy I used to work with goes to church with the guy that was filmed stealing Nancy’s podium.
David Henderson
Jan 9 2021 at 7:24pm
Your second paragraph is spot on. I hated what Trump did and I think, given the closeness of the vote, he absolutely did cost the Republicans control of the Senate. I think of Trump as a spoiled child who can’t stand not getting his way. He has trouble thinking through the consequences to anyone else.
john hare
Jan 10 2021 at 4:14am
FWIW, before the election I thought Trump the lessor of two evils and have changed my mind.
JFA
Jan 10 2021 at 2:21pm
Thanks.
Mark Barbieri
Jan 9 2021 at 5:54pm
I didn’t consider his speech “incitement”. It was overwrought and possibly a little reckless, but I don’t think it crossed the line, at least not criminally. Impeachment isn’t a criminal process and it doesn’t have clearly defined standards (no “beyond a reasonable doubt”).
The more bothersome part to me was the apparent inaction after the riot. It took quite a while for him to say anything and when he did speak, it was nothing like a strong condemnation. There is also some question about whether he was complicit in the delayed response of the national guard.
In the end, I think the best option is to let him fade it ignominy rather than giving him a big stage with a doomed impeachment attempt.
David Henderson
Jan 9 2021 at 6:04pm
The issue of incitement and fomenting is different from the issue of impeachment. I think there are multiple reasons to impeach him, one of the main ones being his complicity in the much more violent attacks of the Saudis on Yemen.
Mark Z
Jan 9 2021 at 7:08pm
One ‘perk’ of successful impeachment is that it would prevent him from running for office again. But if he were to impeached, I think his call to the Georgia sec. of state is far more relevant than his rally speech, which almost certainly doesn’t meet the legal definition of incitement (Jacob Sullum of Reason has a good article on this). Obviously one doesn’t need to break the law to be impeached, but if impeachment is based on an allegation of a specific crime (e.g., incitement to riot), then legal guilt/innocence may be a factor.
zeke5123
Jan 10 2021 at 7:36am
I do think one needs to break a serious law (i.e., high crime / misdemeanor). Now, could Congress just make up what that is? Yes because I don’t really think there is any recourse by Trump. But that doesn’t mean Congress’ act is legitimate.
Mark Z
Jan 10 2021 at 3:13pm
I don’t think something necessarily has to be illegal for it to constitute an impeachable offense. This is of course debated by some constitutional scholars. It seems (at least in the opinion of Hamilton in the Federalist Papers) that the expectation was norms and taboos would adequately govern how legislators decide whether an ‘abuse of power’ is sufficiently egregious to warrant impeachment, even if legal.
Scott Sumner
Jan 9 2021 at 6:03pm
Trump did incite the recent riot in DC, through months of dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric. (Whether he’s legally culpable I don’t know, but certainly he’s morally culpable.) He kept saying the election was stolen—how did he expect his crowd filled with extreme radical right wing fanatics to respond? Especially when he says the election was stolen and we need to be strong if we are going to “stop the steal.” His deluded supporters actually believed that democracy was being taken away from them by a corrupt election process, and that only strong action could prevent it. They saw this as a 1776 moment, worth fighting for. Maybe it would be worth fighting if democracy really was in danger. (Or course it wasn’t.)
Trump was the leading figure planting these crazy ideas in their minds. I’d add that over the last few years he’s used plenty of violent rhetoric in speeches, far worse than the examples you cite.
And finally, although he eventually criticized the rioters, his first reaction was to praise them.
Again, I don’t know the legal issues here, but in a moral sense his guilt is clear.
Michael
Jan 9 2021 at 10:01pm
Scott, everything you said here seems right on. One small point:
He called NFL players who knelt during the anthem SOBs and called for them to be fired. His criticism here was mild by comparison, and subsequent reporting suggested that he ws upset about having upset his followers. It is pretty obvious of whom he approves and dissaproves, and the capitol rioters fall in the former group.
A couple of other things worth noting:
There’s some history of attempted right-wing violence against public figures Trump criticizes – the foiled plot to kidnap and murder the Governor of Michigan, for one example.
Second, some of the people who stormed the Capitol seemed clownish, dressed up in comical outfits and funny hats. But a lot of former military and former/current law enforcement were part of that mob and showed up in bulletproof vests, armed, and with zip ties, etc. There were boms placed near the DNC andf RNC headquaters and IEDs were recovered. As bad as what happened was, it could have been a whole lot worse.
Finally, we don;t know for sure what role if any Trump played in the long delay before activation of the guard. Was he merely asleep at the switch or did he intentionally delay it?
R Richard Schweitzer
Jan 9 2021 at 10:51pm
perhaps this may be an appropriate level at which to consider some salient points:
“Trump” occurred and has been a “symptom,” not A “cause” of the dissatisfactions in the social order; particularly “governance” and the ways its objective have been determined (increasingly) over the past 60 years. [Read: Martin Gurri et al.]
Congress (H.R & Sen.) have long stood in low and diminishing “popular” regard. The functional failures in legislative actions and inactions have desecrated any integrity of those “Halls” far beyond the poor intrusions of a hundred or so unruly persons.
Michael Sandifer
Jan 9 2021 at 6:34pm
I agree with completely with Scott here. Does Trump have to explicitly tell his supporters to go attack Congress to be considered a fomenter of violence in this case? Trump has lied about election fraud for years, setting up Democrats and Republicans who disagree as anti-Democratic traitors. Trump has explicitly incited violence in the past.
Weir
Jan 11 2021 at 2:25am
The answer is no, Trump doesn’t have to explicitly tell his supporters to go attack Congress.
In fact Trump could tell everybody to go to a zoo or to Olive Garden, to hug their children and sing Broadway show tunes and celebrate the beauty of the world as they travel home safe to their loved ones.
If he had said all these things and this had angered some people and left them feeling betrayed and furious with him, and these people had stormed the Capitol in rage at being insulted and abandoned by their hero, then he would have fomented that violence. Feeling disrespected is usually what makes people turn violent.
You can make a man angry by being overly friendly to him. You can encourage a mob to set fire to a courthouse by abandoning it to them. You can make a man resent you by helping him.
Adam Smith was unusual in that he put so much emphasis on results instead of intentions.
The point of impeaching Trump the first time round wasn’t to draw attention to all the payments Burisma had made to Hunter Biden. The censors at Twitter weren’t thinking of the Streisand Effect when they locked the New York Post out of its own account. It’s never the aim of some authoritarian legislation to inspire people to think up some way to evade it.
The usual thing is to insist that the guy who mistreated you had the intention of mistreating you. He knew you were late for work and he intentionally got in your way. He knew exactly what he was doing when he caused you some harm that he claims not to have carried out deliberately.
So people who aren’t Adam Smith insist that everyone is perfectly aware of the consequences of what they did, and the flipside of this is that nobody ever admits to contributing to the problem they point to in others. It would never occur to some people that they too are capable of inciting people into doing these things they deplore.
When we moralize about the sins of others it’s very important to us that the guilty party was knowingly guilty, and intentionally wicked, and depraved on purpose. We aren’t economists, after all.
Greg G
Jan 9 2021 at 7:17pm
You can’t possibly make a good faith attempt to judge Trump’s intent here while entirely limiting yourself to a generous parsing of quotes from this speech. There is a vast amount of other relevant evidence available.
For weeks Trump has been refusing to agree to a peaceful transfer of power and ginning up anger with wild voter fraud conspiracy theories that he has no evidence for and which have been laughed out of court by many of his own judicial appointees.
He chose the date for this rally precisely because it matched this crucial meeting of Congress. His own lawyer Rudy Giuliani said to the crowd at this rally “Let’s have trial by combat.” One of the other lawyers most prominent in advancing his voter fraud claims had called for Pence to be executed by firing squad.
Trump has repeatedly encouraged the QAnon movement which is huge and always turns out in large numbers for his rallies with apparel and signs advertising the cause. They believe that there will be, and should be, a violent insurrection that will keep Trump in power and lead to the imprisonment and/or execution of his political enemies.
Ben Sasse said that White House aides have told him that Trump was delighted with the storming of the Capital and puzzled by why the others around him didn’t see it as a good thing. When he finally did ask the rioters to go home in the first video he was pressured to make, he made no criticism of them and made the kind of gushing display of affection for them he had previously reserved only for Kim Jong Un.
Only in a much later video, after he realized he was losing Senate Republicans did he throw the rioters under the bus and provide a series of quotes that can easily be later taken out of context by supporters in the way the ones in this post were.
I could go on but let me leave you with one question. Why do you think the thing that united the rioters was the belief that they were doing Trump’s will and showing support for him with their actions?
Jerry Brown
Jan 9 2021 at 8:38pm
Ann Althouse invites us to parse the speech of the President of the USA and determine which of the individual words or sentences of a speech constitute an incitement to violence. As if a speech is just a collection of random words or sentences.
Well it isn’t just some collection of words or even individual sentences that determines the meaning or effect of the whole speech upon its audience. Maybe you should listen to it keeping in mind what Trump has said since the election and make your own appraisal as to whether it was dangerous to the people in Congress where that crowd’s anger turned into violent actions.
Weir
Jan 10 2021 at 5:14am
Althouse quotes one of the tweets that Jack Dorsey has identified as a glorification of violence: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Althouse can be held culpable for having quoted those words, which some person could read and translate into violence, the way James Hodgkinson or Alexander Treisman or some other Bernie Bro could go from law abiding citizen to violent criminal without their friends spotting the signs.
I’m culpable now for quoting those same words and quoting those names because anyone could be reading this. So my hands are not clean, and I admit that there’s no reason to think that I’m making a bad situation any better now.
But how much further violence is going to go on before Chris Cuomo or AOC or Maxine Waters would be willing to admit that they haven’t been part of the solution either? That they could easily point the finger in their own direction? Politicians and pundits as reckless as this current crop seem determined to make it worse and worse.
Kamala Harris got it right a dozen years ago when she said that “any effort to excuse or ignore criminal behavior leads to more criminal behavior.” She was exactly right.
But the violence from the left has been so thoroughly normalized in the dozen years since then that she can be on a late night show laughing it up with a comedian and it’s no big deal now when she says the summer’s violence hasn’t gone on long enough. These are the incentives now.
She’s as mainstream a figure as it gets, the new Vice-President, but she’s bailing out violent rioters. She’s given them her full support and when we don’t speak out to say that the inevitable consequence is more of the violence she’s endorsing, all the rest of us are making this problem worse.
Every time that we gave a pass to these reckless people in politics and the media, we were being as irresponsible as Harris herself on CBS: “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”
Ayanna Pressley’s conspiracy theory about the Post Office was dangerous and people who aren’t as powerful as she is need to say so out loud. Social ostracism is the inevitable consequence of saying out loud that “unrest on the streets” is a bad thing, but the inevitable consequence of not saying it is more violence.
When Al Gore’s on TV saying there’s “a criminal conspiracy to subvert the election for partisan purposes” using the Post Office to “start tinkering with the voting process and try to take away from the American people their right to give their consent in an honest and open way” and Anderson Cooper listens to this and is completely fine with it, that’s irresponsible.
Anderson Cooper could have pushed back gently and faced a little criticism from his fans. When someone like me criticizes Al Gore I lose caste. A normal person would be demonized by the left for saying that riots are riots and mobs are mobs, because NPR banned these words in May. But if we want to stop encouraging the violence we need to start behaving as if status and winning the approval of the herd isn’t the most important thing in the world.
The storming of the Capitol in Wisconsin lasted four months. When the Capitol in Minnesota was occupied the rioters used mace, tasers, smoke bombs, and firecrackers. This constant violence, the whole gamut from “milkshakes” and eggs on politician’s heads, celebrated and laughed about for all these years, up to the arson attack at St John’s Church and the murder of Bernell Trammell, all of this is just going to keep happening if people aren’t willing to go on the record saying this should never have been normalized.
MikeP
Jan 9 2021 at 10:11pm
I have watched listened to, and read a lot of media during and since the storming of the Capitol. I have yet to see or hear anything from Trump that I would call incitement. Certainly the people accusing him of incitement have had the opportunity to find something, and they seem to me to have failed.
Here, for instance, is NPR’s attempt:
That is utterly pathetic. Trump incited a mob to take the Capitol by years of talking like Trump? How can anyone take such an accusation seriously?
Indeed, right here no one has quoted anything Trump has said that remotely meets the definition of incitement. Instead they whinge about what other people quote. A Bayesian would find that informative.
JFA
Jan 10 2021 at 7:06am
Trump constantly tells his followers (who have been prone to engage in violence (see their protest in December in DC)) for two months that the election was stolen, that the election was rigged, that the election was fraudulent, that the election is illegitimate, that the Democrats and RINOs are trying to steal your country from you. Then he tells a whole crowd of them that they must go to the Capitol because you’ll never take your country back with weakness.
After being told all that by someone you seemingly adore, are you just supposed to walk in an orderly manner and stand behind police barriers and yell at a building from a distance? I think pretty much everything out of Trump’s mouth is BS, but if I actually believed widespread fraud was being ignored and that the election was stolen and that my country was being taken from me, I would feel a duty to act more forcefully.
MikeP
Jan 10 2021 at 6:31pm
…if I actually believed widespread fraud was being ignored and that the election was stolen and that my country was being taken from me, I would feel a duty to act more forcefully.
Well then you wouldn’t be one of the orders of magnitude more people who did not assault and enter the Capitol than those who did. So all the people who were loitering outside while the Capitol was attacked either don’t believe that or don’t feel they had a duty to act that forcefully.
Daniel Kuehn
Jan 9 2021 at 10:20pm
I think there are two questions: what’s evidence of incitement that can be used in court and what’s actually incitement. I’m not a lawyer but it wouldn’t surprise me if there is nothing in the speech that rises to the former.
So what about the latter? This depends on context and what Trump knew and your assessment of what his own expectations and therefore will vary from person to person but it’s becoming clear there was open planning to storm the Capitol and Giuliani at least referenced violence. Was all this circulating and Trump didn’t know it when he sent them to the Capitol? Seems difficult for me to believe but maybe you or others believe that. This is also in the context of years of telling his followers to be violent and he’d cover their court costs.
Might he escape legal jeopardy? It certainly seems like a talent of his to make those escapes. But that’s not the only way to evaluate this.
(I did watch the speech, a few hours later in the afternoon of the 6th)
Rebes
Jan 9 2021 at 10:30pm
There was also another speaker, Rudy Giuliani, who called for trial by combat. I only know one definition of combat.
Scott Sumner
Jan 10 2021 at 12:03am
Good point. Trump frequently praises right-wing extremists, some of who advocate violence, racism etc. Trump’s speeches frequently include violent rhetoric. He also says much nicer things about brutal foreign dictators than he does about mild mannered democratic leaders. He advocated reversing the will of America’s voters in the 2020 election. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what Trump actually thinks of authoritarianism. (He’s for it.)
Greg G
Jan 10 2021 at 7:07am
Exactly right Scott. Trump is an authoritarian through and through and always has been. If you want to see something really eye opening read his 1990 Playboy interview.
In it, he praises Chinese leadership for showing “strength” with the massacre at Tiananmen Square and says that they “almost blew it” by hesitating to order the massacre. He contrasts his admiration for those ordering the massacre with his contempt for Gorbachev’s weak leadership in allowing the Soviet empire to unravel.
Trump changes his mind on many things but he is always consistent in viewing every kind of strength as a good thing and every kind of weakness as a bad thing. In his world, giving up power for any reason is always contemptible.
Ted Sanders
Jan 10 2021 at 2:06am
I thought these quotes were worst (see link):
https://facebook.com/tedsanders/posts/10108110757723334…
He didn’t call for insurrection. But among many things he said, he:
lied that the election was stolen
lied that we wouldn’t have a country anymore if we didn’t stop the election from being stolen
said that we needed to fight like hell to stop the election from being stolen so that we would still have a country
I am comfortable calling it incitement.
If someone I trusted told me that elections had been stolen illegally and that we wouldn’t have a country anymore if we allowed the perpetrators to take power, I would risk my life and safety to defend democracy.
Unfortunately, all facts indicate his followers were lied to.
I agree with your implicit point that criticisms of Trump should be specific rather than general (e.g. “incitement” or “coup”). I think specific criticisms are easier to evaluate and agree on. I hope the quotations I supplied have helped set a good example for others.
+1 to everything Scott Sumner said above.
AMT
Jan 10 2021 at 4:28am
The full list:
Well I’ll say this: Trump is very stupid, but he’s not so unbelievably stupid that he forgets to use coded language. Again, context matters. When a mobster says, “what a beautiful family you have, it sure would be a shame if something were to happen to them,” you know that the mobster is threatening to murder your family if you do not comply with his demands. But those exact same words uttered by the insurance salesman are correctly interpreted very differently.
Greg G
Jan 10 2021 at 7:24am
There is more than that to the mobster analogy.
In Trump’s lexicon, someone who co-operates with law enforcement to bring down criminals is “a rat.” Someone who refuses to co-operate with law enforcement is “staying strong.”
In his early real estate career he shared a lawyer (Roy Cohn) with the mob and was used to making deals with them to facilitate the construction of his buildings. As always, he admired mobsters for their power, especially where it exceeded legal power.
Michael
Jan 10 2021 at 7:52am
Good point, AMT.
Question: If you believe those words to be the truth, are you obliged to take action, even violent action? If not obliged, are you justified?
Mark Z
Jan 10 2021 at 3:40pm
The issue with this argument imo is that, from an act consequentialist perspective, violence would likely be justified or necessitated even in the service many mainstream political positions, because of how much is purportedly at stake, but it’s nonetheless assumed that when someone, say, argues that some particular politician or CEO or whatever is evil, is doing terrible things, will keep doing terrible things until they’re stopped (pretty common in politics), and implicitly are arguing that the world would be better off if the person didn’t exist, that nonetheless doesn’t amount to saying someone should kill the hypothetical person, because we all generally assume for ‘rule consequentialist’ (or deontological) reasons that violence isn’t justified even if the stakes are extremely high. So heightening the stakes doesn’t it itself amount to giving moral license to violence.
Imblio Lohdun
Jan 10 2021 at 5:11am
Interesting to see again how people can look at the same statements and see different things. Most likely this is based on how they see Trump. Those that were assigned by the conservative media the opinion that he is the protocter of the nation see him inciting psychological strength and endurance. Tradtional American virtues. Those that were assigned the opinion of the left-wing media, that he is a striving dictator and morally hollow clown, see him clearly inciting violence.
Obviously context matters in deciding if someone is inciting violence or not, but how do you agree on the correct context if you cant agree on a shared reality? Cancelling and throwing people in jail based on rules like this will be seen as very divisive. It´s one thing to be punished for something you know you did, it´s another to be punished for a motive someone else imagines you had.
Libertarians have pretty much always seen the language of governance as a language of violence. Maybe our language of governance is inherently tainted like this, if you dont agree with the policies or methods, you are bound to see it just as threats of violence?
KevinDC
Jan 10 2021 at 7:39am
My mish mash of various thoughts here –
Several others have pointed out the legal/moral distinction. On the question of whether Trump said anything that meets the very high bar required by the legal definition of incitement, the answer is likely no. (I say only “likely” because I’m no lawyer, so I have to assume a decent sized margin of error in my judgment.) But, as I’m hardly the first to observe, that doesn’t free Trump from moral culpability.
To bring my proverbial bat down once more on the dead horse, context matters. And, when acting as a speaker, you have a moral obligation to consider the state of your audience. If you’re speaking to a crowd that is on the verge of frenzy, you have a moral obligation to be very judicious in what you say, to be very careful not to push things over the edge. If that crowd is on the verge of frenzy because you’ve spent months whipping them into that state with lies designed solely to soothe your bruised ego, your obligation towards restraint only magnifies. And Trump fell wildly short of that.
I know I’m breaking Godwin’s Law here, but I do think the comparison is apt. On the night of Kristallnacht, there were no direct calls to violence by any speakers. But it was the culmination of a long campaign of railing against a supposed evil and vile group who wanted to bring the ruination of the country and trod all over the decent people of the nation. But, technically, nobody actually called for anyone to go out and smash up any storefronts. Trump’s rhetoric has been little better – explicitly declaring on numerous occasions that his opponents literally want to “destroy the country.” And I think it’s clear that his supporters took those claims both literally and seriously. They actually believed that the total downfall of the nation hinged on this.
Something I would add to the list of troublesome lines in the speech – technically, two things. One is partially captured in item 6 from the compiled list:
We’ve had enough. We won’t take it anymore, that’s what this rally is about. We will stop the steal. In the minds of the crowd, the “steal” was about to happen in the Capitol building. They were being repeatedly told they must stop the steal, that’s what they were there for, and that we won’t take this anymore. Actual, literal call to go smash up the Capitol? No. But, as I mentioned above, you have a moral obligation of restraint when directing an angry mob – and this was placing an open can of gasoline next to a raging flame.
Again, telling an angry mob that if they don’t fight like hell, they won’t have a country anymore. While this also isn’t a literal call to go smash up the Capitol, it’s not difficult to predict the kind of influence these words will have on an angry mob that believes the survival of the nation depends on what they do. So, I think Trump is morally culpable to something like incitement (in the moral sense, not the legal sense).
zeke5123
Jan 10 2021 at 7:51am
This is a bit of a rorschach test as evidenced by posters up above. Those who find Trump despicable will mention “context” to say he incited citing Trump’s alleged inaccurate claims about a stolen election as a mobster telling supporters to riot at the capitol.
Other’s who are perhaps more amenable to Trump will look at his words and point out they can be read just the same as….being loud and protesting as is normal in American politics.
Who is right? I would probably say those who aren’t blinded by hatred on the basis that people generally want their actions to result in positive things for themselves. Trump turning out hundreds of thousands of people to yell and scream makes him a political power for a while. Trump turning out an unruly mob instantly destroyed his political power going forward.
As for Sumner complaining that Trump baseless his undermined the democratic process, Sumner really doesn’t get it. A free and fair election isn’t just about counting the votes properly. It is the overall process. That process includes:
A free and fair media
Creating voting procedures that don’t lead to obvious failure modes (e.g., vote harvesting, fraud that is hard to detect).
Not changing voting procedures last second.
Counting the votes in an open and transparent way (which did not occur).
It is entirely possible that Trump loses in a free and fair election, but when you literally have major media conspiring with SV to preclude people from reading negative stories about Biden it is hard for me to tsk tsk Trump on claims that it it was a fraudulent election because it was not a free and fair election because the process was not really good (i.e., it
Michael
Jan 10 2021 at 8:10am
Other’s who are perhaps more amenable to Trump will look at his words and point out they can be read just the same as….being loud and protesting as is normal in American politics.
No, the cannot. What has happened in the last ~2 months is unprecedented in American political history. We have never had a President (or candidate for President) 1) lose the election, 2) refuse to admit that he lost, 3) claim without producing a shred of evidence that the election was stolen from him, 4) rally his supporters to take action on his behalf, 5) Falsely claim that under out Constitution, it was entirely up to the sitting VP to decide who really won the election.
When Al Gore lost, he didn’t immediately concede and he did pursue a legal challenge. He did not claim that the election was stolen or incite his supporters to take action on his behalf, nor did then-President Clinton. When his legal challenge failed by 5-4 Supreme Court decision, he stated that he disagreed with the decision but would accept it, and he did not attempt additional legal challenges even though some on his team (running mate Joe Lieberman) argued that he should. Instead he conceded and the presided appropriately over the electoral vote-counting session.
When Hillary Clinton lost she conceded the next day. When Richard Nixon lost a close election he conceded – even though his loss was close and our elections were arguably less fair then than they are today.
Trump turning out an unruly mob instantly destroyed his political power going forward.
I think it is as yet far from clear that he destroyed his political power going forward.
A free and fair media
Creating voting procedures that don’t lead to obvious failure modes (e.g., vote harvesting, fraud that is hard to detect).
Not changing voting procedures last second.
Counting the votes in an open and transparent way (which did not occur).
This is all propagandist garbage, especially the last point.
This election was free and fair, and Trump lost by over 7 million votes.
zeke5123
Jan 10 2021 at 11:42am
It is equally true to say that nothing in the few months leading up to the election was precedented in American political history. There were serious changes to election law in numerous states in the few months leading up to the election which invited obvious failure modes. There were things that happened on election night that certainly raised eyebrows (even if many had explanations). There were some statistical models put forth that suggested fraud. The problem is that when you have a system that basically allows fraud it is very hard to prove after the fact.
FWIW, #5 was bonkers.
Of course, the circumstances were very different with Clinton (e.g., there wasn’t some odd even if explainable vote dumps in the middle of the night, there wasn’t a change in election law). What was Hillary’s argument? Hillary surrogates were actually arguing for Hamilton electors.
It also isn’t obvious that Nixon choose properly. Sure, he prevented a messy conundrum for the country, but maybe people’s faith in elections is upheld if claims are throughly investigated.
Indeed, one is tempted to point out that Biden himself helped preclude a transition from Obama to Trump even invoking the ludicrous Logan Act.
How is propagandist garbage? For example, there is more evidence supporting that Joe Biden himself was involved in a suborning American FP to his own pecuniary interest compared to Trump himself being involved in the Russian conspiracy. Which one was broadcasted, day after day, and which one was actively not covered (and blocked by social media)? The idea that the media wasn’t in the tank for Biden doesn’t pass a laugh test.
Explain how mail-in voting doesn’t create obvious failure modes? See France.
Explain how there wasn’t changes last moment for voting procedures in a number of states?
Explain how Fulton county counted votes in an open manner? Maybe it was due to incompetence instead of malice, but seems quite clear Fulton wasn’t counted in an open manner.
Andrew Richardson
Jan 10 2021 at 11:06am
You’re ignoring two important things here. For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the election was stolen. If the election had been stolen, wouldn’t revolution be justified? But it wasn’t. And anyone monitoring Trump’s supporters, which ought to include President Trump, could see that they were planning violent responses to this on Parler and td.w.
Imagine I loudly — and falsely — proclaimed that a man had attacked me. Then when a big crowd gathered, I said “thank you for coming to defend me. Be strong and be tough!” And then the crowd went and lynched the man who I claimed had attacked me. Would it be accurate to say I had incited the crowd to violence? I think it would be.
Trump’s the president and the leader of the Republican party. People look up to him, and he’s in a position of ultimate responsibility. And he’s chosen to tell incendiary lies which have provoked violence.
Steven Brown
Jan 10 2021 at 12:01pm
Mr. Henderson, longtime fan here. You’ve missed the mark with this one. While Mr. Trump may not have expected the full extent of the mayhem that ensued, he knows enough about his most ‘ardent’ supporters that the likelihood of some kind of trouble was high. He also knows that his imprimatur, as president, and as ‘dear leader’ of that deluded throng, would mean that his (ridiculous) claim that the highest crime in a democracy, the stealing of an election, was taking place at the Capitol, and would be taken as gospel. Therefore, his exhortations to march to the Capitol to ‘cheer on’ the attempts to prevent what he had painted as the highest treason in U.S. history, were a negligently reckless catalyst to what ensued. Parse the language any way you like, what he did is morally equivalent to incitement.
Why, Mr. Henderson, did you choose to take up this particular argument, when there are so many more that would benefit from your considerable insights?
David Henderson
Jan 11 2021 at 6:54pm
You ask:
First, thank you, Steven, for your implicit compliment.
To answer your question, it’s because I see a lot of people making a claim on an important issue that I think is not based on enough evidence.
As I admitted to one commenter above, maybe I need to go beyond the transcript and watch the video. The problem is that I can’t stand watching that guy. But maybe I should bite the bullet.
Greg G
Jan 12 2021 at 7:25am
David,
The additional evidence you claim to be seeking is not in the video of speech itself. It is in the vast amounts of additional evidence on the matter of intent that lie outside of the speech and in the larger context both before and after the speech.
Trump had been claiming for months on Twitter that his political opposition was guilty of treason and should be arrested and punished for treason. Merely going back to watch the video of the speech is just a formula for confirmation bias. It is being the guy who limits his search for the lost keys to the area under the streetlight. You have had dozens of comments here begging you consider this other evidence outside of the speech and you conclude from that…that you should watch the video of the speech to clarify the issue?
In the larger context, Trump’s most rabid supporters (the ones most likely to attend a rally of this type) had been recently disagreeing on whether or not Mike Pence should be shot by firing squad or hanged and advocating martial law. That is the atmosphere in which they were told to go to the Capital and “stop the steal” on a day that Trump had tweeted “will be wild.”
I have been reading your posts for years because, even though I sometimes disagree with them, I have found you to be consistently very lucid, reasonable, well informed, amiable and fair minded. Lately something seems different. I am thinking also here about your recent beefs with Cowen in which you gave him the least generous reading possible. This has been a hard year for everybody. That just means we need the old David back more than ever.
David Henderson
Jan 12 2021 at 11:19am
Greg G,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. And I say that with no irony or sarcasm.
I hope you understand that, whatever our disagreement on the issue at hand, I’m judging the narrow issue and not judging the man (Trump). My guess is that our judgment of Trump is pretty similar.
John Smith
Jan 10 2021 at 12:10pm
In recent times, David’s articles seem to be increasingly extreme. I am a hardcore hardline conservative (classical liberal), and even I feel more and more uncomfortable with his articles.
It is of course his entitlement to write as he pleases. But as a viewer, I wish to note my displeasure at such a radical direction. I typically read econlib articles without looking at the author’s name, and nowadays whenever I am shocked by an article, it is by David.
David Henderson
Jan 11 2021 at 6:57pm
Thanks, John.
Just so I know how and what you’re judging, could you point to three recent posts by me that you find extreme and off-putting? It’s possibly a good criticism, and so I would like to consider it, but I need to look at the evidence.
Tom DeMeo
Jan 10 2021 at 12:24pm
Just calling for and participating in a rally like that on that day is clear evidence of intent. That crowd was the culmination of a long term relentless campaign that had no means to resolve the pressure, except through violence. He used every ounce of his political strength and skill to strip away anything that might make that crowd not explode. He systematically degraded every conceivable element of trust that might get in the way.
There was literally no other outcome possible. The argument here is that he just didn’t quite say, “Go down there and overrun the Capitol building. Break past security and attack Congress”. No, I guess he didn’t do that.
MikeP
Jan 10 2021 at 5:00pm
There was literally no other outcome possible.
Of course. That’s why both the Washington Post and the Washington Times ran front page stories Wednesday that said “Capitol will be overrun by riotous mob”. Why the Capitol Police failed to read those papers that morning is anyone’s guess.
If the security was at all competent, or if the apparently vast intelligence and certain conclusions people think are so obvious now were obvious then, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So there literally was some other outcome possible.
Tom DeMeo
Jan 11 2021 at 9:03am
I was referring specifically to Trump pursuing his strategy relentlessly and the crowd pushing through to breach the capitol, not the resulting potentialities. What happened at that point where the crowd established angry contact with the Capitol security perimeter could have gone a hundred different ways. The crowd could have caught some legislators. The Capitol Police could have shot lots and lots of rioters dead.
Was there a way for security to somehow peacefully deflect the crowd away due to large numbers of boots on the ground and advanced preparation? That is very difficult to claim, but possible. It is also possible that something even more horrible might have occurred.
The reality is that the Capitol, with both houses in session and the Vice President there, should have been protected by essentially unconstrained deadly force. Only massive incompetence prevented this. Consider what that would have resulted in.
timothy liptrot
Jan 10 2021 at 6:42pm
1. The president has a clear responsibility to protect congress regardless of disagreements between them. Suppose that Lincoln had a dispute with his congress about conscription. In response he allowed the Army of Virginia to raid Washington. Obviously allowing the president to selectively protect congress undoes all checks and balances. It also tells the states “you need to defend your interests with violence”. If you game selective protection out, every state is sending its congressional delegation to Washington with an army.
If voters and states do not enforce on the presidency a responsibility to protect congress regardless of disagreements, what value does the constitution have.
Trump’s response to the riots was to delay the national guard. His video during the attack almost encourages them. You can see right here how the governor of Maryland interpreted those events – https://governor.maryland.gov/2021/01/07/this-assault-on-our-democracy-cannot-stand-governor-hogan-provides-update-on-marylands-response-to-insurrection-at-u-s-capitol/
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Jan 11 2021 at 8:33am
Whether what Trump said or did meets some legal standard of incitement is irrelevant: impeachment is a political process with the political goal/consequence of removing him from a political office and disqualifying him from ever holding it again. His actions over the last two months threated the political basis of constitutional government and his dismal performance over the last year more than justify removing him.
Floccina
Jan 11 2021 at 3:31pm
I agree but still think he should impeached and removed from office (I’ve asked my congressional representatives to impeach and remove). He keeps saying he won by a landslide, he it therefore either lying about an important issue or is delusional. Either should be grounds for removal.
David Henderson
Jan 11 2021 at 6:49pm
You wrote:
I agree that it’s probably one of the two. But I think removing a president for lying about an important issue or being delusional is a pretty strong move relative to the offense.
Michael
Jan 11 2021 at 9:30pm
Well, delusional raises concerns about fitness for office, depending on what exactly is meant by the word.
“Lying about an important issue” is an understatement that does not capture the damage done here (convicing people to almost literally take up arms and go to war for him).
DeservingPorcupine
Jan 11 2021 at 5:36pm
Yeah, put me in the camp of context and implications mattering enough to render him morally culpable.
Dick White
Jan 12 2021 at 5:43pm
Excellent series of posts by serious people.
Condemn Trump if conduct demands it (in your opinion).
Forget impeachment: the statute is clear “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed on Impeachment for, and Conviction of Treason…” Trump will be gone in 8 days, hence no “removal” and no cause of action. Even the half-a-loaf scenario of the House preparing, voting for and submitting Articles of Impeachment in the next 8 days and declaring this action as “impeachment” is an unlikely, though possible, action. It would qualify as a “brutum fulmen” and representative of the activity of that legislative body.
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