little more Less than a week after Donald Trump was assassinated at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Ohio Sen. George Lang was warming up the crowd before a speech by Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), when he began talking indifferently about how the country needed a civil war.
“I fear that if we lose this election, it will take a civil war to save the country — and it will be saved,” Lange said Monday. “It’s the greatest experiment in human history, and if we get to the point of civil war, I’m glad we have people like … Bikers for Trump on our side.”
Lang later wrote that he “regretted” the remark, which was made “in the midst of the excitement that prevailed in the theatre”.
Regardless of his pangs of conscience, Lang’s comments are not an isolated event — Trump and his allies have been contemplating political violence and the possibility of civil war for years, even as experts warn that America’s growing political polarization puts the country at risk of such scenarios.
A few weeks before Lang’s on-stage comments, footage emerged of Shelby Bush, the chair of Arizona’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, threatening to “execute” an election official in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, where Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020.
“If Stephen Richter walks into this room, I will hang him,” Bush said in a video posted online by Richter, a Republican. “I don’t unite with people who don’t believe in the principles that we believe in and the American cause that founded this country. So I want to make that clear when we talk about what it means to unite.” (Bush later told Washington Post “She was kidding.”
In June, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon repeatedly invoked the possibility of war while addressing a conference of the Turning Point movement of young conservative activists. “Are we at war? Is this a political knife war?” he asked. (According to CNN, this bizarre and oddly specific phrase is linked to “the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes in the years leading up to the Civil War.”)
“Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024?” Bannon continued to ask the conference attendees. “It’s very simple: victory or death!”
That same month, Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, was talking about the need to eliminate political enemies—“bad people,” “people with bad intentions”—when he told supporters gathered at a church: “Some people need to be killed! It’s time for someone to say it. It’s not about revenge. It’s not about chutzpah or malice. It’s about necessity!” Robinson, who was later given a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, said.
The list goes on. Last year, Georgia Sen. Colton Moore raised the possibility of civil war in an interview on Bannon’s podcast, The War Room. “We need to take immediate action,” Moore said. “Because if we don’t, our constituents are going to be fighting in the streets. I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to pull out my gun. I want to make this problem go away through the legislative means of doing so.”
Candace Taylor, a Republican running for governor of Georgia, made reference to the civil war in her response to Donald Trump’s accusation that he was trying to overturn the election there. “This is treason. This is war, and I hope and pray that it will be resolved before we use weapons. I really do,” Taylor said. “I don’t want to see bloodshed in America, but we are at war now: a war for our freedom.”
When asked by Tucker Carlson about the possibility of civil war here in the United States a little less than a year ago, Trump himself spoke warmly of Jan. 6 — the day his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election — calling it “the most beautiful day” some of his supporters had ever seen.
“You know, January 6th was a very interesting day because they didn’t report it properly. I think it was the biggest crowd I’ve ever talked about.” [to] “Before that, a very small group of people went down there,” Trump told Tucker Carlson. “There are a lot of scenarios we could talk about. But the people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they had ever seen. There was love, there was love, there was unity. I’ve never seen such spirit, such passion, such love… I’ve never seen, at the same time, from the same people, such hatred for what they did to our country.”
Asked directly about the possibility of open conflict, Trump demurred, saying, “I don’t know, because I don’t know what, you know — I can say this: There’s a level of passion I’ve never seen before. There’s a level of hatred I’ve never seen before. That’s probably a bad combination.”
