Republicans have rallied around country singer Jason Aldean after his song that apparently glorifies vigilante violence generated controversy and was removed by some channels – and a historian flagged that support as another alarming development in the GOP's ongoing radicalization.
The song, "Try That In A Small Town," seems to celebrate mob violence to preserve the mythical ideal of small towns – replete with retribution against Black Lives Matter protesters and flag-burning demonstrators – and despite being pulled from rotation by Country Music Television, it has been viewed millions of times on YouTube and adopted by right-wing culture warriors as a rallying cry, wrote The Bulwark columnist Thomas Lecaque.
"I was thinking of Aldean’s song as I watched the coverage of Trump’s rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, this past weekend, where the rhetoric of mob violence – or even of murder fantasies — was disturbingly on display," wrote Lecaque, a scholar of religious violence and apocalypticism and associate professor of history at Grand View University.
Lecaque recounts interviews with Trump supporters conducted by the Right Side Broadcasting Network, in which one rally attendee tells correspondent Matthew Alvarez he wants to "kill them all" – meaning, in his words, "the left and the RINOs and the globalists." The historian said those comments reflect the fanaticism the former president inspires.
"So much of what surrounds Trump is performative – the idea that he’s a successful businessman is a TV show, not a reality," Lecaque wrote. "The notion that he’s ultramasculine is made for 8kun memes, not reality. The idea that he’s a God-touched avatar of the presidency is a subject of fantasy artwork (or whatever one calls the work of Jon McNaughton). And the rhetoric of violence that suffuses the contemporary far right is at least partially performative in that way."
"Trump loves the side glance and the plausible deniability — but the malice that comes with it is clear," he added.
The ex-president stokes anger toward his enemies by ominously warning they intend to destroy his supporters' way of life, and while he and the crowd feed off those vacuous threats in a type of call-and-response feedback loop, some listeners are motivated to take action.
"Maybe it’s just rhetoric — but when Trump posted a suggestion of former President Obama’s home address on Truth Social, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and January 6th attacker went after Obama with rhetoric suggesting an assassination attempt during his livestream," Lecaque wrote. "It’s always just rhetoric until the murders become real, not performative."
Trump has been inching closer to the QAnon conspiracy theory since before the 2020 election, and while it generates less media attention nowadays its adherents remain committed, and the former president even played a song at the end of his rally that sounds similar to its theme song “#WWG1WGA."
"This is the grotesque vision that unites these things — a Jason Aldean song, a Trump rally, and QAnon: What they want is a different world, a purified world in which all of the people unlike them are gone. And gone with violence," Lecaque wrote. "Each of them invites or at least imagines violence done to their opponents to drive them out of their utopian future."
"What they all hope for, though, is that someone else will do the dirty work for them," he added.
