Sticks and stones may break our bones — but these Trump words can really hurt us

Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility that carries with it real obligations for self-control.

The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally kill you, imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.

When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” “terrorists,” or “traitors,” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.

But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who were imprisoned for expressing their opinions on the genocide Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out in Israel, or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had the bad fortune of being brown-skinned when Miller was on one of his racist jeremiads, even though Garcia had legal permission to stay in the US.

This is why even after 9/11 George W. Bush measured his words, going so far as to emphasize that Islam wasn’t our enemy. So did Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, even as the country he led was under attack by actual traitors committed to ending democracy in America.

In his first inaugural address, on the verge of the Civil War, he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, understood that as a government official with the power to kill by firing squad or imprison, it was his obligation to turn down the heat.

“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Cox told the nation when Trent Robinson was arrested on suspicion of killing Charlie Kirk. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”

Trump, Miller, and the GOP more generally haven’t gotten the message.

Trump blamed the “radical left” — as if there actually is any meaningful number of people in America calling for communism — for the killing, and then on Thursday told reporters, “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

When Matthew Dowd notes on MSNBC that Kirk engaged in hate speech, the worst that happens is the network fires him. Ditto for when Fox’s Brian Kilmead called for America to emulate Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, where physicians killed homeless and disabled people by lethal injection, later moving on to mobile vans that used their exhaust to kill. The worst Kilmead can expect is to be fired, although given how shamefully unprincipled Fox management is, that’s probably unlikely.

But when government officials describe people using language that could lead to any of us being investigated, arrested, or even imprisoned or deported because of our politics, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s a genuine threat to our system of government, our rule of law, and to the safety and security of all of the American people.

Because when they start hauling away Americans for their opinions, when they threaten to pull our citizenship or passports — as Trump and other Republicans have recently done — history tells us it’s not a long trek to using those same tactics against people who thought they were on the “right side.”

Indeed, it’s already started to happen: just ask James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, who are all now facing criminal investigations for speaking out against Trump. All these lifelong Republicans had to lawyer up after Trump publicly called them “criminals.”

When Miller — who the White House wants you to know definitely does not play with porcelain dolls — says the Democratic Party (which he can’t bring himself to say; he instead uses Joe McCarthy’s “Democrat Party” slur) “is not a political party; it is a domestic, extremist organization,” he’s laying a legal foundation for criminal investigations and arrests per the Patriot Act.

When he vows to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising under Trump’s leadership to use law enforcement to “strip them of money, power, and freedom” and threatening that members of the left who “spread evil hate” will “live in exile” he’s not just a commentator: he’s a man who wields actual power over life and death, imprisonment or freedom.

This rhetoric is particularly troubling since all of the previous 31 politically-motivated violent attacks in America have been committed by rightwingers.

Or consider Elon Musk, the world‘s richest man who created and ran the DOGE program to dismantle our government. He spoke to a crowd in England this weekend and said:

“The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”

And he wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden or anybody like that. He was talking about people like you and me:

“[Y]ou see how much violence there’s on the left with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly; the left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean let that sink in for a minute. That’s who we’re dealing with here. That is who we're dealing with.”

When Trump is asked how to heal the country and says, “I couldn’t care less” and adds that, “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he’s inciting stochastic lone-wolf terror against Democrats and setting up rationalizations for government actions like Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree that ended all free speech protections in Germany in 1933.

And now a member of Congress is introduced legislation to strip the passports of anybody who “supports terrorism.“ The bill’s author is a former soldier in the Israeli military: you know what direction this is going.

The few rational people still left in the GOP need to reach out to this administration and convince them to follow the example of every other president since Andrew Jackson to dial back the rhetoric, acknowledge the fundamental humanity of Democrats and others on the “left,” and their absolute right to advocate for their own, different vision of a better America with fewer guns, more unions, and free healthcare and free college (the actual “radical left” positions).

Because when a government points its finger at you — when it decides you are the enemy — the entire machinery of the state lines up behind that accusation. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the lesson of history, written in blood and exile and mass graves.

Every authoritarian regime began not with tanks in the streets but with leaders who used words like weapons and convinced their followers that fellow citizens were traitors. Every one. Trump and his enablers are replaying that script, right here, right now.

The only question left is whether we’ll recognize it for what it is and slam on the brakes, or whether we’ll watch, paralyzed, as the state’s power to cage, exile, or kill is once again turned inward, but this time, against us all.