Inciting Sedition: the inevitable outcome of Trump’s lies

If you support and voted for trump and claim you’re saddened or surprised or shocked by the events of 6 January 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, you’re lying to yourself and to others. What happened that day was the inevitable outcome of his lies and consistently escalating rhetoric over the past four-plus years in which he glorified, encouraged, and incited physical violence against anyone he perceived as an opponent to him or an obstacle to his corrupt personal objectives and ambitions:

• 16 June 2015 in New York City: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
• 23 Oct. 2015 at a Miami, FL, campaign rally: “See the first group [of protesters at this campaign rally], I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!”
• 21 Nov. 2015 at a Birmingham, AL, campaign rally:“Get him [Black activist Mercutio Southall] the hell out of here! Get him out of here! Throw him out!”
• 22 Nov. 2015 on FOX: “Maybe he [Southall] should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it.”
• 23 Jan. 2016 at an Iowa campaign rally:“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
• 1 Feb. 2016 at a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, campaign rally:“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. There won’t be so much of them because the courts agree with us.”
• 23 Feb. 2016 at a Las Vegas, NV, campaign rally:“I’d like to punch him [a protester] in the face…. We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
• 23 Feb. 2016 at a Las Vegas, NV, campaign rally:“They said to me, ‘What do you think of waterboarding?’ I said I think it’s great, but we don’t go far enough. It’s true. We don’t go far enough. We don’t go far enough.” 
• 27 Feb. 2016 at an Oklahoma campaign rally:“You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. A lot quicker. In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast — but today, everybody’s politically correct. Our country’s going to hell with being politically correct. Going to hell.”
• 29 July 2016 at a Scranton, PA, campaign rally: “You know it’s interesting. Every time I mention her [Clinton], everyone screams, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ They keep screaming. And you know what I do? I’ve been nice. But after watching that performance [Clinton’s criticism of Trump at the DNC] last night — such lies — I don’t have to be so nice anymore. I’m taking the gloves off.”
• 7 Oct. 2016 in a 2005 interview with Billy Bush on Access Hollywood: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
• 17 Feb. 2017 in a tweet: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
• 28 July 2017 in Brentwood, NY, to law enforcement officials: “Now, we’re getting them [criminals] out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”
• 15 Aug. 2017 at a press conference after the violence in Charlottesville, VA, where a Nazi sympathizer killed Heather Heyer with his car: “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”
• 22 Sept. 2017 at an Alabama rally after NFL players knelt during the National Anthem: “Wouldn’t youlove to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’”
• 2018 in a tweet directed at North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
• 18 Oct. 2018 at a Montana rally when referring to Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte (MT), who, in May 2017, body-slammed a reporter: “Any guy who can do a body-slam … he’s my guy.”
• 29 Oct. 2018 in a tweet: “The Fake News Media… [is] the true Enemy of the People.”
• 5 Apr. 2019 in a tweet: “The press…. are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
• 8 May 2019 at a Florida rally: “How do you stop these people [asylum seekers and migrants]?” Someone in the crowd shouted, “Shoot them!” “That’s only in the Panhandle, you can get away with that statement.”
• 14 July 2019 in a tweet referring to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
• 17 Apr. 2020 in a tweet regarding COVID-19 stay-at-home orders: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”
• 17 Apr. 2020 in a tweet regarding COVID-19 stay-at-home orders: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
• 17 Apr. 2020 in a tweet regarding COVID-19 stay-at-home orders: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA and save your great 2^nd It is under siege!”
• 28 May 2020 in a tweet responding to protests against police violence in U.S. cities: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen…. [W]hen the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
• 31 Aug. 2020 when justifying the actions of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha, WI, by mischaracterizing the situation: “I guess, he was in very big trouble, he probably would have been killed.”
• 22 Sept. 2020 at a Pittsburgh, PA rally: described examples of National Guardsmen using physical force on reporters covering protests as “a beautiful sight.”
• 29 Sept. 2020 during the first Presidential Debate: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
• 1 Jan. 2021 in a tweet: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”
• 6 Jan. 2021 on the Ellipse south of the White House to thousands of Trump supporters: “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing and stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore…. All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people…. [W]e signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years and everything stopped. Did you notice that? It stopped. It all stopped…. Our media is not free. It’s not fair. It suppresses thought. It suppresses speech, and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country…. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you…. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong…. You will have an illegitimate president, that’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media…. And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore…. [W]e’re going to the Capitol.… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
• 6 Jan. 2001 in a taped message addressing pro-trump rioters after they forced their way into the Capitol and overwhelmed Capitol police, resulting in the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick: “We love you. You’re very special.”
• 8 Jan. 2021: Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that on Wednesday Trump “wanted chaos on television” and was “confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.” Sasse also said that trump was discussing “a path by which he was going to stay in office after January 20.”

Since June 2015 you had ample warning about him, his motives, and his methods. You’re complicit if you voted for him out of self-interest, if you justify or excuse the MAGA insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, or if you claim that you didn’t know this would happen or that this seditious riot wasn’t his fault. You knew or should have known exactly who and what Trump was from years of documented cases of his own words in which he brags about and incites physical violence against reporters, political opponents, women, immigrants, and counter-protesters. For that reason, you are responsible for your own willful ignorance, callousness, selfishness, and/or contempt for equal treatment under the law and culpable for enabling this wannabe dictator. As a result, you, too, bear responsibility for the seditious and traitorous mayhem that exploded in D.C. on Wednesday.

Shame. On. You.