Any call for President Trump or Republicans to comment on the lunatic Coast Guard officer arrested last week should be seen for what it is: an attempt to force the White House and the GOP to own this guy, and therefore his white supremacist ideology, as an issue.
Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the cable show where five different people take turns saying the exact same thing for three hours, an on-screen graphic blared, “TRUMP SILENT ON PLOT TO KILL CRITICS.”
“Not a word from Trump,” huffed show host Joe Scarborough. “Not a word from [GOP Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell. Not a word from [GOP House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy. Not a word from the Justice Department. That is pathetic.”
This is precisely what happened during the 2016 election with David Duke. Without having said a word about the long-forgotten Klansman, the media and Democrats demanded that Trump account for Duke’s racism. But why should Trump have had to answer for someone whose company or association he had never sought?
Take Al Sharpton, Scarborough’s MSNBC colleague. To this day, he has not apologized for his role in the Tawana Brawley hoax. That incident of a false rape report in the 1980s inflamed national racial divisions in a way rarely seen since. (The 2006 Duke Lacrosse case, which also turned out to be fake, is probably the only similar case from recent years.) Sharpton played a starring role in two major incidents of anti-Semitic violence during his career in New York City, one of which resulted in seven deaths.
Yet, every four years, every Democratic presidential candidate treks to New York to kiss Sharpton’s ring for the nomination — Sen. Kamala Harris of California is the latest. It would be far fairer to make any of them answer for Sharpton than it is to expect Trump to answer for some random crazy person he’s unfamiliar with and has never met. But not one Democrat is ever asked to account for Sharpton’s conduct.
Liberals might argue that Trump waived this defense on the Coast Guard maniac by weighing in this week on actor Jussie Smollett’s apparent hoax hate crime. But Trump was thrown into that by Smollett himself when he blamed the crime on the president’s supporters.
The notion that the Coast Guard crazy, Lt. Christopher Hasson, plotted to target Trump’s “critics” for violence is a ruse. Court documents don’t point to any coherent political alliance or philosophy on Hasson’s part, outside of a nebulous hate for “liberalist/globalist ideology.”
Messages recovered by prosecutors from Hasson’s computer show that his primary motivation was white supremacism. He was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth,” and he was looking for a catalyst that would make his violent fantasy come alive — namely, a mass riot pitting law enforcement against left-wing groups like the Black Lives Matter movement.
Hasson was thinking up ways to “provoke” nationwide conflict in order to inflict “complete destruction,” according to prosecutors. When you read that portion of the court filings, it makes clear why he would then search the Internet for, among other things, “what if trump illegally impeached” and “civil war if trump impeached.” It’s not because Hasson was inspired by Trump. It’s because he saw heated political conflict as a means to his unrealized end. He wanted to see Trump impeached because he hoped civil unrest would follow.
The evidence suggests Hasson was first and foremost a white supremacist who looked to a 2011 terrorist attack in Norway for inspiration as to how he might carry out a similar one here. He wrote in an email draft: “During unrest target both sides to increase tension. In other words provoke gov/police to over react which should help to escalate violence. BLM protests or other left crap would be ideal to incite to violence.”
He also fantasized about possibly becoming a sheriff or city mayor and of learning chemistry, if that gives you any insight into his mental stability.
Hasson is a crazy person and a white supremacist, in that order.
No evidence has tied Hasson to Republicans or Trump. Why should they be expected to answer for him?
