Robert Bowers was not a normal man interested in politics but incited by Donald Trump or the Republican Party’s rhetoric; he was a murderous man with anti-Semitic views antithetical to Trump’s party and his very family. Cesar Sayoc was not an otherwise upstanding Republican driven to mail bombs to prominent liberals by President Trump’s words — he was a freak with a rap sheet as long as his arm, including a previous bomb threat that had nothing to do with politics. The idea that Sayoc would not have been a threat to anyone if Trump had not inflamed him with trash talk about CNN or the Democrats is nonsense. He would have been no less of a violent criminal if Hillary Clinton or Mohandas Gandhi had been president.
Liberals know this, but they do not care: Sayoc and Bowers are clubs with which to beat Trump and the Republicans. If Trump were tearful and begging for absolution from the people who hate everything he stands for in politics, they would be no more merciful in morally cudgeling him. No Republican president has ever been spared liberals’ wrath because he tried to appease them. If Trump denounced his own voters as deplorables, as a legion of Sayocs and Bowerses, the liberals who attack him now for his defiance would attack him then for having ever attracted such people — and the only remedy, then as now, would be a complete Democratic victory this November and in 2020. Liberals don’t think conservatives or Republicans should be polite. They think they should lose.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member