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After the second indictment of Donald Trump, some extremists in the Republican Party have made barely veiled threats of violence against their fellow citizens. People who believe in the American idea should respond with faith in the American constitutional order and open disdain for people in public life who are both dangerous and ridiculous.

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Vigilance and Scorn

I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias.

I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.

It’s less funny if you have to explain it, but the idea of Kari Lake going from television anchor to cult leader after a pandemic seemed pretty on the nose, and her whole Grand Guignol act is so close to Zerbe’s melodramatic thundering that I couldn’t resist.

But maybe the joke isn’t that funny. Lake may be inane, but insofar as any of her followers believe that she’s issuing a call to action, she is also dangerous. She’s not alone; after news of Trump’s indictment broke, two of the most disgraceful members of Congress, Andy Biggs and Clay Higgins, essentially called for open conflict with their fellow citizens. “We have now reached a war phase,” Biggs tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye,” he added, going full Hammurabi.

Higgins, meanwhile, issued a tweet of paramilitary babble:

President Trump said he has “been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”

This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this.

Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.

As Jeff Sharlet wrote in The Atlantic this weekend, Higgins is trying to sound like a militia commander, issuing orders to his troops on behalf of “rPOTUS,” or the “real president of the United States.”

My first reaction to both of those tweets was basically: Whatever, Sgt. Rock. But perhaps that’s not enough. Trump and his cult followers, especially those in public life, have made threats of violence a routine part of the American political environment. (I have received many such threats over the years that I’ve been writing about Trump.) Notice, for example, how Trump has gone out of his way to name Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife: Trump knows that Smith is a tough prosecutor who has dealt with some hard characters and is unlikely to fear a weak man like Donald Trump, so he put Smith’s wife in the public eye—and in the crosshairs of his supporters. It’s become commonplace to say this is Mafia-like behavior, but that’s something of an insult to the old-school Mafiosi who generally left family members alone when settling their beefs.

As Sharlet noted, Trump’s most violent supporters are not nearly the majority they think they are, so there’s no point in fear-driven hysteria. Nevertheless, such people can be dangerous not only to their fellow citizens but to the constitutional order itself, by inducing anxiety about democracy among ordinary citizens and potential office seekers, as well as a reluctance to speak out and participate in our system of government. (Also, it takes startlingly few individuals who are willing to commit acts of violence to do real damage.)

So maybe what we need is a solid balance of vigilance and scorn. National politicians gibbering their own down-home versions of “Hail Hydra” should be an ongoing scandal: Such behavior is un-American, and every supporter of American democracy should respond with the self-assured contempt that free people must bestow on the aspiring authoritarians among us.

I know that some readers will object, saying that spotlighting such behavior in the media spreads its reach, but I disagree: The nature of a hyperconnected, internet-driven society means that the kind of people who admire someone like Clay Higgins already know where to find him. Higgins knows this too, which is why he sent his message on Twitter—or “in the clear,” as intelligence folks would say. He wasn’t sending instructions to putative comrades waiting for a sign; rather, he was apparently hoping that ordinary Americans would see all this spy-speak applesauce and become fearful that hidden armies are waiting to avenge the arrest of Donald Trump.

In the media, every elected Republican should be asked every day about these threats, especially those from members of Congress, not because such questions will induce a sudden fit of conscience in Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell but because after the violence of January 6, 2021, the voters have a right to know if a national political party is going to stand behind members talking about “war” and pretending to issue marching orders to seditionists. (CNN’s Dana Bash tried to get an answer from Representative Jim Jordan on Sunday. It went as you’d expect, but at least she asked.)

Finally, there’s nothing wrong with some dismissive scorn among sensible voters. These people are not 10 feet tall. They are, in fact, small and ridiculous. (This is why I couldn’t help but laugh when Lake hissed about the NRA; the hooded face of Matthias just popped into my head unbidden.) As I wrote more than a year ago, naming lunatics and shaming poltroons is essential to a healthy democracy. But the prodemocracy movement must fight with the confidence and maturity of adults:

Ditch all the coy, immature, and too-precious language about former President Donald Trump and the Republicans. No more GQP, no more Qevin McCarthy, no more Rethuglicans and Repuglicans. No more Drumpf. No more Orange Menace … Be the adult alternative to the bedlam around you.

Juvenile nicknames too easily blur the distinction between prodemocracy voters and the people they’re trying to defeat. If you’ve ever had to endure friends or family who parrot Fox-popular terms like Demonrats and Killary and other such nonsense, think for a moment how they instantly communicated to you that you never had to take them seriously again.

I know it’s hard to find the right balance between vigilance and alarm, between scorn and flippancy; I’m not always sure how to do it myself. It’s a line all of us find difficult to walk, because we’ve never had an American political scene so thoroughly infested with kooks, conspiracists, and would-be traitors. But remember: They are a minority, and they know it, and many of their leaders are likely more fearful—of irrelevance, of change, of failure—than anyone else. Take their threats seriously, but with the faith that American democracy was here before them and will be here after them.

Related:

The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up” The new anarchy

Today’s News

The former Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, known for his polarizing politics and his role in multiple scandals, has died at the age of 86. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has signed a disaster-emergency declaration following the collapse, yesterday, of a section of I-95 in Philadelphia, which will potentially disrupt traffic in the area for months. Ukraine says that its military has reclaimed seven villages in the Zaporizhzhia province and the eastern Donetsk region in its first gains since it began its counteroffensive.

Famous People

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn manifest a successful growing season for Brooklyn’s crops with a garden party.

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Evening Read

Photo illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

What Reparations Actually Bought

By Morgan Ome

In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their payment: The actor George Takei donated his redress check to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. A former incarceree named Mae Kanazawa Hara told an interviewer in 2004 that she bought an organ for her church in Madison, Wisconsin. Nikki Nojima Louis, a playwright, told me earlier this year that she used the money to pay for living expenses while pursuing her doctorate in creative writing at Florida State University. She was 65 when she decided to go back to school, and the money enabled her to move across the country from her Seattle home.

But many stories could be lost to history. My family received reparations. My grandfather, Melvin, was 6 when he was imprisoned in Tule Lake, California. As long as I’ve known about the redress effort, I’ve wondered how he felt about getting a check in the mail decades after the war.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I couldn’t mention The Omega Man without recommending it to you. It’s … not great, but it was a fun addition to Heston’s run of sci-fi pictures that included Planet of the Apes and its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (a movie that doesn’t get enough love as a great sequel, in my view), as well as Soylent Green. Filmed in 1970, The Omega Man is a strange time capsule from its era. It was set in the near future of 1977, two years after a Sino-Soviet war (which nearly happened a few years before the movie was released) sparked the use of biological weapons and wiped out most of the planet. Heston’s romance with a Black female lead—Rosalind Cash, in her first major movie role—was pretty daring for its time. The Omega Man was actually the second movie based on Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel, I Am Legend; the first was The Last Man on Earth in 1964, starring Vincent Price. (Frankly, both of those are better than the messy Will Smith remake released in 2007.)

Critics did not love The Omega Man, but then, critics didn’t love much about cheesy early-1970s science fiction. It’s a movie best seen at a drive-in, but because those are now mostly gone, you could do worse on a rainy afternoon than stream this one and watch Heston passing his days in a deserted Los Angeles watching the documentary Woodstock over and over (no, really) before doing battle with a bunch of technology-hating ghouls.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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