Talking About 'Death and Destruction' Before You Hold a Rally in Waco Is Not Subtle

You hate to see "Waco" and "death and destruction" too close together. Donald Trump began last week with some all-caps TRUTHing about what he said was his impending arrest in relation to the Stormy Daniels hush money investigation. The former president called for "PROTEST," imploring his followers to "TAKE OUR NATION BACK!" But that turned out to be merely a prelude to a far more direct illustration of the stakes, as Trump Truthed a simple question on Friday:

He added another query to cap things off, for which he helpfully provided an answer:

Why and who indeed.

As usual, the big guy has conflated his own interests with the country's, an underrated part of the dynamic of the period between the election he lost and January 6. The "stolen election" nonsense was window dressing: Trump told his fans that THEY are STEALING YOUR COUNTRY AWAY, and his followers would have to fight to get it back. The evidence of rigged voting machines and the machinations of Hugo Chavez was not actually all that important, so it wasn't important for it to make any kind of sense. It was about vibes: fear and loathing regarding the notion that Those People were set to take power, and that this constituted such a cataclysmic event that proto-revolutionary violence might be justified to prevent it. (The Jan. 6 types speak in 1776-ish quite often.) Trump has since embraced defendants who've been jailed on allegations they committed crimes on January 6, closing the loop of intra-MAGA legitimacy for those superfans who attacked the national legislature to keep him in power.

Of course, it would be a major problem for American democracy if a former president were indicted as a form of political retribution, or as a means to remove him from political life. (There were major questions of this variety down in Brazil a few years back, though it was Trump's amigo Jair Bolsonaro who stood to benefit that time.) However, it's hard to say this is a political prosecution without having seen the actual indictment—if there is one—or the actual evidence supporting it, which hasn't stopped pretty much every Republican around from saying so already. And besides, Trump spent this weekend making it abundantly clear that the war will not be fought in the realm of reality—and that "war footing" is an appropriate descriptor. After all, he kicked off his campaign in earnest with a rally in Waco, Texas.

I'm not sure many Americans, regardless of their political persuasion, are looking for the 2024 election to be the "final battle" no matter what that means. Most of us expect to hold further elections thereafter, in which we continue to choose our own political leaders for limited terms in power.

But the Waco of it all ought to tell the story. Ronald Reagan kicked off his first presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi—where three civil-rights campaigners were murdered in nearby Philadelphia during the Freedom Summer of 1964—to send a particular message. (The theme was "states' rights.") Not for the first time, Trump has gone for something Reaganite minus all subtlety. Waco was the site of a showdown between federal agents and the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic sect of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which ended in mass casualties: four ATF agents, two residents of nearby Mt. Carmel, four sect members killed by federal agents, and 67 members of the group killed by a fire that engulfed the compound. That last group included children, and Waco went on to become a kind of genesis event for the modern white power and militia movements. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, cited the federal action at Waco among his justifications for the worst domestic terror attack on U.S. soil.

The equation here is not complicated. Just as Waco became justification for far-right political violence that followed, Trump is trying to position his supposed persecution by prosecutors as justification for whatever "death and destruction" follows down the line. Granted, he says the "death and destruction" is in response to his false indictment, which we can't speak to without seeing said indictment, and anyway, when did it become acceptable for a politician to suggest his supporters will respond with violence to a development within our legal system? Again, Trump has already closed the MAGA loop on January 6. He's rewarded those individuals willing to use violence to advance his goals with praise, allegiance, and the promise of a pardon if he's re-elected. He's drawn up a path for people willing to "fight" a possible indictment for him, an unnervingly sprawling version of his promise to pay the legal fees of rallygoers who attacked protesters critical of him in 2016.

The remaining question is whether or how many of his superfans have the appetite for this stuff now. It will likely depend on Trump binding them even more closely to him personally, if that's even possible—turning the SAVE AMERICA! stuff into window-dressing for SAVE MY ASS! in just the same way VOTER FRAUD! was once window-dressing for TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK! This is "I Alone Can Fix It (David Koresh Essential Mix)", and we can only hope it never hits the Hot 100.

If you think this is all reading too much into things, consider that at the Waco rally, the most recent former president once again delivered his apocalyptic visions of a Trumpless America over music that is similar to "the QAnon song."

QAnon, of course, is a cult which believes in part that Trump is fighting a heroic battle against a cabal of pedophiles (and sometimes, child's-blood drinkers) in the Democratic Party and the larger Washington establishment, a story that once again begins to sound like a pre-justification for political violence. He has been doing this on and off since September of last year, when a crowd at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio responded to the tune with a collective salute that seems to be some sort of QAnon pledge of allegiance. He's started to more openly embrace the Q dross. Make no mistake: just as some of us warned in the post-election period that Trump would never agree to a peaceful transfer of power, he will stop at nothing to fight his way out of legal peril in a number of different jurisdictions. For now, becoming president again is probably his best bet, but it's not the only one he'll be willing to make.

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