The GOP Must Make Amends With Those Who Disavowed the Big Lie

(Bloomberg Opinion) — The online schadenfreude that has followed the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been callous and crude — to put it mildly, a sad commentary on the state of civility. But it’s nothing compared to what we might see in the event of a presidential assassination. And that possibility, unfortunately, is very real.

Donald Trump is fond of comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln (favorably, of course). And in one respect, the two do share a bond: Not since 1860 has a president-elect faced such a high risk of assassination.

In July, a would-be assassin in Pennsylvania missed his target by a whisker. In September, another was nabbed at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course before he could fire. In November, the Justice Department revealed an Iranian plot to kill Trump. Sadly, that seems unlikely to be the end of it.

Democrats don’t publicly wish for Trump’s death, of course. Basic decency forbids it, and so does the steep political cost it would carry. But private thoughts and conversations are another matter. And in the event of an assassination, they would come out in the most inflammatory ways. The only question is: How bad would the backlash be?

“If someone shoots Trump, this place is coming apart,” Rusty Bowers told me over breakfast at a diner in Phoenix, Arizona, two weeks after the election. Bowers, an accomplished painter and sculpture artist, is the former Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives who opposed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

We were joined at the diner by another law-and-order Republican, Clint Hickman, who helps run a four-generation family egg farm and served as chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors during 2020, when the county’s vote count became a national flashpoint. As elected officials, both had a duty to take claims of fraud seriously, no matter how outlandish.

“Maduro was one,” Bowers said of the idea that the Venezuelan president had been involved in rigging the vote. “The Balkans were one. Space was one.”

“German server, Chinese thermostats,” Hickman chimed in.

“The bamboo,” Bowers continued. “The ballots had a high level of bamboo in them. They must’ve been printed in China.”

“We chased everything down,” Hickman said. “We didn’t chase down the Jewish laser – that was a tough one. NASA wasn’t quite getting on the phone with us.”

It was all nonsense, of course, but many people believed it. For them, it didn’t matter how the vote was overturned, so long as it was. Even before the election, one of Bowers’ House colleagues, Mark Finchem, had been promoting the idea that in the event of a Joe Biden win, the legislature could simply toss out the state’s electors and replace them with Trump supporters.

Trump and Rudy Giuliani tried to push Bowers to embrace that theory, too, to no avail. As both faced intense White House pressure, they were also receiving countless death threats — around 20,000 a day, Bowers said. Emails, voicemails, texts, including threats to his kids. At the time, Bowers was in and out of the hospital, trying to attend to his daughter, who was suffering from a severe long-term illness. She died three weeks after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

Hickman calls the online mob the “the 101st Chairborne” — those who make threats from the comfort of their own homes, in hopes someone else carries them out. And sometimes, they do. Mobs converged on both their houses. At least one man had a gun.

The number of threats was so vast that law enforcement hardly even looked at all of them. Only one person went to prison, a man from Iowa who left a voicemail for Hickman threatening to hang him, after a 2021 audit upheld the Maricopa County results. He faced up to 10 years in prison but received only two and a half years, after Hickman asked the judge to show mercy and compassion.

Whether Trump might pardon him is anyone’s guess, given what the president-elect has said about pardoning others who tried to take the election results into their own hands. But the more important question is: Can Republicans begin to make amends with fellow party members like Bowers and Hickman, Mike Pence and Liz Cheney, who had the courage to uphold the law?

Trump loyalists tried to oust Bowers in a recall election, even though he had knocked on doors for Trump and voted for him. When that effort failed on technical grounds, Bowers faced a primary challenge in which he was subject to the far right’s favorite smear: pedophilia, with mobile billboards touting the despicable claim.

Bowers lost. Hickman, reading the room, opted not to run again.

Election victories have a way of papering over party weaknesses, as Democrats painfully learned in November. While Trump is now riding high, the GOP’s de facto excommunication of its defenders of democracy — voters have drummed nearly all of them out of office — poses a long-term risk not only to the party, but to the country.

The vigilante anger ginned up in 2020 culminated in the attack on the Capitol, but it did not disappear afterward. Although obscured by Trump’s victory, it is still simmering just beneath the surface, only a spark away from roiling American life again.

That spark would’ve come in November had Trump lost, since he made clear that he would not accept defeat. It’s impossible to say what might have happened, but it’s easy to imagine that, this time, blood may have been spilled even before January 6. 

“If this was a close vote and everything hinged on Arizona,” Hickman said of the 2024 returns, “I wouldn’t be at this table. I’d be sitting in some damn bunker, and I’d be getting death threats again.”

Trump’s comfortable margin of victory allowed swing state officials to dodge bullets. Yet it also let Trump’s most loyal backers avoid responsibility for emboldening a spirit of political vigilantism that could yet overtake the party again, especially if Trump were to be assassinated.

“We don’t have a party,” Bowers said. “There’s a mob of thugs, and they run around patting each other on the back. It’s not about policy at all.” And yet, partly for that reason, no one is praying for Trump’s safety more than Bowers and Hickman.

“If civility goes,” Bowers said, before pausing. “I’ve seen movies. It could be real.”

It’s unpleasant to be writing about a potential assassination and what might result, but ignoring the risk only worsens the danger. If it comes, Republicans need to be prepared to stand up to the extreme voices within their party, uniting against those who might use violence to fuel violence.

Democrats must be prepared to do the same, standing against expressions of schadenfreude that might inflame tensions and fuel violence. Comments about Thompson’s murder by Senator Elizabeth Warren — she condemned the act but called the supportive online response to it, “a warning to everyone in the health care system” — carry exactly the kind of implicit threat her own party should denounce.

Imagine such words being spoken after a Trump assassination, only with “health care system” replaced by “Republican Party.” Not good.

As we finished our meal, Bowers mentioned he’s supporting open primaries, which make it harder for each party’s extreme wing to control elections, while Hickman spoke of focusing his political energies beyond the current electorate.

“I’m skipping my generation now — I’m going right to the kids,” he said. He’s also going to their parents, by asking them: “Hey, if this stuff goes to hell, do you want your son to carry a gun against a fellow American?”

What he often hears — no, not my kid, but fine if it’s someone else’s — doesn’t surprise him. “This 101st Chairborne is real,” he said. And Trump has elevated the practice of issuing threats, yet leaving the dirty work to others, to government policy.

In a recent Meet the Press interview, the president-elect was pressed over his comment that Cheney and Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the House Select Committee on January 6th, “should go to jail.” Would he direct his attorney general and FBI director to send them to jail? No, Trump said, he would not, but “they’ll have to look at that.” One can almost hear the 101st Chairborne lining up their recliners to demand “justice.”

Before we left,  I asked Bowers and Hickman whether are they more or less optimistic about the future of the country, compared to four years ago.

“Less,” said Bowers, because of the potential for political conflict to turn violent. It hasn’t helped that his old colleague Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers who was part of the mob at the Capitol on January 6th, has just been elected to the state senate.

Hickman was more ambivalent, expressing some hope that the end of the election might allow some healing to begin.

As we said goodbye, Bowers told me that, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he and his wife have signed up for a two-year senior missionary stint. At age 72, he isn’t giving up on public service.

“We’re just waiting to hear where we’ll be sent,” he said.

Someplace will be awfully lucky to have them. If only it were Washington, D.C.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of the new book, ‘Back Roads and and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.’

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