John Krull
The violent attack on the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, raises two important questions.
The first question is: Where are the adults in the conservative movement?
The second is: When are they going to put their house back in order?
The man who broke into the speaker’s San Francisco home and assaulted her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer was — big surprise — an antisemitic alt-right devotee who littered his social media pages with Donald Trump-style conspiracy theories and other intemperate rants. This camp follower of the former president battered a man 40 years his elder, sending the octogenarian to the hospital with a fractured skull and other serious injuries.
The attacker’s real target, though, wasn’t Paul Pelosi. As he pounded on the old man, the attacker yelled, again and again, “Where is Nancy!”
That cry, of course, echoed the one used by the mob Trump summoned to Washington and then encouraged to assault the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump gives no more thought to the consequences of his actions than a natural disaster does. He reels through this world heedless of the harm he does because he never learned to be concerned about others and he’s always had someone else around to clean up his messes.
Trump’s inability to function as a moral man wouldn’t matter as much as it does if others who should and presumably do know better didn’t enable him.
But they do.
At best, they turn a blind eye and stay silent when he hammers away at one more standard of decency after another, when he assaults pillar after pillar of civility and self-government.
At worst, they encourage the transgressions of Trump and his followers by condoning them or trying to explain them away. They dismiss the violent attack on our national capitol — an act of aggression previously performed only by an enemy in wartime 200 years ago — as little more than a tourist excursion.
Or they make jokes about the violence that follows in the former president’s wake, just as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a likely future Republican presidential candidate, did at a campaign event after the Pelosi assault.
Who taught these people that this is the way adults behave?
Who led them to believe that mature human beings throw two-year tantrums when something doesn’t go their way?
Who raised them to think that encouraging violence is the proper way to deal with a political setback?
These are not partisan or ideological questions.
One reason conservative thought has played such an important — even essential — role in American history is that it so often focused on consequence. Conservatives argued that institutions mattered and that traditions should not be discarded willy-nilly because such institutions and traditions often are all that hold a diverse society together in times of tension and trouble.
Yet these same conservatives now sit on their hands while a human wrecking ball swings wildly across the land, knocking down the foundations of both Constitution and country.
Or, worse, they use the near-fatal assault on a grandfather with a passion for amateur musicals as a punch line on the campaign trail.
I understand the political challenges confronting Republicans. They need Trump’s base to have any chance of success at the polls. They also fear his wrath and realize his condemnation in a primary can damage, perhaps fatally, any GOP stalwart’s chances of success.
Many of them doubtless thought that the former president somehow would get better — that he would grow into the job and his responsibilities.
Others likely believed they could use him to achieve their priorities — big tax cuts for the wealthy and a packed U.S. Supreme Court — without any great cost to themselves.
But he has cost them.
When otherwise decent human beings make jokes about near-fatal attacks on senior citizens, Republicans have not elevated or civilized Donald Trump. Rather, he has diminished them.
They cling to him because he helps them gain office. But is any office worth one’s dignity? One’s decency? One’s humanity?
Being an adult means one accepts responsibility for one’s actions — and inaction.
It’s time for the adults in the conservative movement to speak up.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
