Republicans keep talking about ‘riots’ and ‘civil war.’ Believe them.
ARepublican state representative in Georgia claims he doesn’t want a civil war. But he keeps talking about the possibility of violence in his state if Donald Trump and his codefendants are tried on charges of attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.
“I told one senator . . . we’ve got to put our heads together and figure this out. We need to be taking action right now,” Colton Moore said during a recent appearance on a talk show hosted by farright agitator Steve Bannon. “Because if we don’t, our constituencies are going to be fighting it in the streets. Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle. I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so.”
“This problem,” as Moore sees it, is Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who indicted Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and 17 others on 41 counts for crimes ranging from racketeering to conspiracy to commit election fraud. For months, Willis has been inundated with threats, which have only grown more violent and racist since the 45th president of the United States became Inmate #PO1135809 when he was recently booked at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.
Of course, the real problem isn’t Willis — or Jack Smith, who will prosecute Trump for mishandling classified documents and on federal election interference charges; Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee the latter trial; or Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who charged Trump with multiple counts of falsifying business records. Like Willis, all of them have received threats and menacing calls since Trump’s various indictments.
The problem is Republicans’ willingness to thwart the rule of law by any means necessary. If the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection showed that many Republicans are willing to tolerate political violence as legitimate discourse, the years since have proved they have a distinct taste for evoking it, especially in defense of Trump.
Just as with racism and white supremacy, Trump didn’t invent violence as a political tool in this nation. Lynchings, race massacres, and an 1898 insurrection by white supremacists in Wilmington, N.C., were all acts of political violence. But as a Republican presidential candidate in 2015, Trump mainstreamed it, starting with the rallies during his first White House campaign when he would encourage his supporters to assault any protesters or hecklers.
By 2016, Trump was warning that there would be “riots” if he didn’t get the Republican nomination. And everyone remembers what happened on Jan. 6 — even as some Republicans continue to downplay it. Trump himself called those he incited to violently breach the US Capitol in an attempt to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election that he lost “great patriots.”
So a grim pattern is set. Whenever Republicans don’t get their way, they dangle threats of violence, but usually couched as concern — “We don’t want civil war, but we just want everyone to know there could be civil war.” What Moore is suggesting is barely different from what Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said last fall. Months before Trump was indicted, Graham said there would be “riots in the street” if Trump was prosecuted for mishandling classified information.
After the White House condemned Graham’s comments as “dangerous,” the senator’s spokesperson said Graham was “predicting/forecasting what he thinks will happen.” As if that made his remarks acceptable.
So far, no widespread violence on the level Republicans keep predicting has occurred after any of Trump’s four indictments. But days after the
FBI searched Trump’s Florida home for classified documents in August 2022, a gunman tried to force his way into the federal agency’s Cincinnati office. He was killed in a shootout. Officials later found messages he posted on Trump’s Truth Social telling others to “be ready for combat.”
This August, a Utah man, who described himself as a “MAGA Trumper” and posted violent threats against Bragg, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, was shot and killed during a confrontation with FBI agents who attempted to serve him with a warrant.
Instead of GOP officials warning colleagues to stop the incendiary rhetoric, such incidents have only invited more incitement. The same party that anoints itself the guardian of “law and order” has no use for either when they interfere with Republicans’ hunger for control and vengeance. Moore isn’t just some lone loudmouth state senator talking about civil war and his rifle. He’s the insistent sound of a political party that disdains the rule of law as much as democracy.