The power of words

"I have the best words," Trump once claimed. It's now up to the Senate to decide if he was right.

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The third day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump was dominated by the former president’s counsel’s attempt to defang the central charge that he had incited his crowd on the Ellipse on January 6 to attack the Capitol and commit “violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts,” by telling them "if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore."

The word “fight” was used 377 times today, according to a count by the Washington Post, in videos the Trump lawyers showed of Democrats saying the word over and over and over again.  Trump’s counsel focused on “fight” because it was the operative word in the article of impeachment approved by the House and sent to the Senate. The Democratic case against Trump hinged on the idea that Trump incited the crowd by encouraging them to march to the Capitol and “fight” against the forces which had stolen the election from him.  To counter this argument, Trump’s lawyers attempted to show that if Democrats could use the word “fight” rhetorically in political speeches, so could Trump.  The First Amendment is just as much on Trump’s side as it is on Maxine Waters’.

But the sentence quoted in the article of impeachment isn’t what incited the crowd to riot.  They had been whipped into a frenzy of rage and hate long before they arrived on the Ellipse to listen to Trump’s speech.  They had brought themselves to Washington because Trump had fed their false sense of victimhood, confirming their irrational idea that they are somehow disrespected and discriminated against by the “fake news” media and liberal establishment that doesn’t believe in their values. 

Trump has been telling them for five years that they are right to be angry because their country has changed.  His speech was replete with appeals to their paranoid fantasies of anger and revenge.  He has told them they are being left behind and denied things that are rightfully theirs, and that their dignity is being taken from them.  He affirms their fear that their children are being turned against them by school curriculums that are full of lies about the founders, lies that it was slaves who built the country, not their white ancestors.  He confirms their feelings that they are losing jobs and college admissions because their skin is white, or their religion is Christian, or their home is not in a big city. 

QAnon and the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters didn’t need to be incited with the word “fight.”  The air they breathe incites them.  What their eyes see incites them.  What their ears hear incites them.  

His slogan, “make America great again,” is an incitement.  So is his constant refrain that “we need to take our country back,” because it implies there is someone – and we know who it is – that has taken it from them. 

Trump’s people knew what to do.  There really is a mob mentality that can be depended upon especially when it has been fed a steady diet of red meat racism and lies by the master of the game.  All he had to do was gather them together and point the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, which he did.  It was all the incitement they needed.  His words were superfluous.