Gretchen Whitmer and the Trump Administration’s Dangerous Hypocrisy

Last Thursday the U.S. Justice Department announced the arrest of 13 men for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The governor responded with shock, saying “I knew this job would be hard, but I’ll be honest, I could never have imagined anything like this.” Attorney General William Barr responded with . . . silence. On Friday, after being pressed by the Michigan attorney general, a Justice Department spokesperson had to assure us that Barr finds the plot abhorrent. Barr has stayed in the background, presumably, because he doesn’t want to judge the sprawling, Trump-supporting, U.S. militia movement by its most dangerous and extreme participants. And it is true that most militia members outside the Michigan State Capitol are just shouting and waving guns rather than plotting felonies.

The attorney general’s hypocrisy here is not only appalling; it is dangerous. The head of the U.S. Justice Department, following President Trump’s lead, is legitimizing right wing extremism and potential violence. He seems incapable of condemning right wing extremism or speaking critically of the loosely knit militia movement, even as his own FBI director warns Congress that it is a primary source of domestic terrorism. What is more, while the FBI continues to do its job investigating criminal activity, Barr and the president have a disturbing habit of undermining the agency’s work through changes in prosecution and presidential pardons. When members of the Wolverine Watchmen are arrested for a brazen plot to kidnap a sitting state governor, the Trump administration will naturally dismiss them as a few bad apples. When police are, infrequently, prosecuted for killing unarmed black men, the Trump administration will say that those few individuals “choked” or made rare mistakes.

The hypocrisy of this is on full display every time Barr and Trump talk about Black Lives Matter or other protest movements on the political left. After denying the existence of police brutality and systemic racism, they work tirelessly to define the Black Lives Matter movement by its most extreme and dangerous participants. Indeed, listening to Barr and Trump, one would think that every Black Lives Matter protester is a violent extremist bent on burning down American.

And this brings us back to Governor Whitmer’s stated surprise at the plot that was revealed last Thursday. The plot is disturbing, but learning that right wing militants where plotting against the government is hardly surprising. This is, after all, the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people.

I explain this in my new book, This Land Is My Land: Rebellion in the West. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has a single, coherent ideology. Each party is, in fact, a coalition that has joined together for some common benefits. And these coalitions change over time. Over the last forty years, the conservative coalition has shifted substantially. Private militias, white nationalists, and anti-government extremists have moved from the Republican Party’s outer fringe to its center. President Trump did not cause this, but he has revealed and celebrate the extent of this transformation.

William Barr and Donald Trump are not personally responsible for the plot against Governor Whitmer, but they are making even more room for militias and extremists in the Republican Party. As that elements continues to expand, we should not be surprised that the most extreme of this element plot and commit acts of political violence.