In the days since a mob of Trump supporters waged an attack on the U.S. Capitol, I’ve been thinking a lot about the week in October 2018 when a supporter of President Donald Trump was caught mailing explosives to prominent Democrats and a right-wing gunman slaughtered 11 people at a Pennsylvania synagogue. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about Trump’s reactions to the events, which were arguably inspired by his own rhetoric.
Trump opened his remarks during the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit event at the White House with an update on the bombing story, which had dominated the news that week: An arrest had been made.
“These terrorizing acts are despicable and have no place in our country,” he told the crowd, describing an actual attempt to murder his political rivals. But within minutes and without a trace of self-awareness, Trump asked the crowd, “Who gets attacked more than me?”
“I can do the greatest thing for our country, and on the networks and on different things, it will show bad,” he sulked. At another point during his speech, he attacked “globalists” (“They like the globe. I like the globe too.”) and grumbled that a White House announcement the day before “didn’t get the kind of coverage it should have” because it was “competing with this story that took place,” referring to the bombs being sent to Democrats.
That speech will forever stand out as not just a summation of the Trump presidency, but of the conservative movement and its victimhood complex, in general.
The man arrested for sending those bombs was Cesar Sayoc, a hardcore Trump supporter who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The day after Trump’s speech, a white nationalist named Robert Bowers murdered 11 people in a shooting spree at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Bowers’ attack was driven by a belief that a migrant caravan was being secretly funded by billionaire George Soros. This was a popular narrative in right-wing media that continued on in the weeks following the attack.
Trump’s response to the synagogue shooting, like his response to Sayoc’s bombing spree, omitted details about the motivations behind the attack. Rather than criticizing the absurd narrative that helped drive the attack, Trump instead condemned hate in a general sense before suggesting that the victims of the massacre should have protected themselves.
Through the lens of Trump’s past self-pitying comments, the conservative response to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol makes sense.
Even as the mob tore through the Capitol, Trump continued to position himself as the actual victim. Sure, five people died, members of Congress were terrorized, and the rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” but Trump couldn’t help but throw himself a pity party.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” tweeted Trump, continuing to push the lies that he was the true winner of the election and that Pence had betrayed him by refusing to single-handedly overturn the results.
Even in his tweet urging people to go home, he justified what had happened by portraying his supporters as the real victims, writing, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
The insurrection was hardly spontaneous. While it’s no surprise that fringe social media sites like Gab, Parler, and the pro-Trump Reddit clone TheDonald.win were filled with calls for violence ahead of the January 6 certification of the Electoral College votes, mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook were also unwitting staging grounds for the violent uprising.
Although Twitter and Facebook have long had rules against inciting violence and have each pledged to crack down on accounts which support the QAnon conspiracy theory, enforcement has been spotty. That changed after the 6th. Trump, whose lies about the election being stolen from him have helped fuel the right-wing rage, has had his account banned or suspended by virtually every social media platform so as not to incite additional attacks. But these well-deserved bans simply gave the right another opportunity to play the victim.
As thousands of other accounts were suspended in the wake of the Capitol attack, conservatives working in media and government focused on what’s really important: their follower counts.