Trump and Conservative Media Are Shamefully Attempting to Turn Ashli Babbitt Into a Martyr
As he occasionally does in his typically brainless, logorrheic fashion, Donald Trump issued a statement on Wednesday that would be unremarkable except for the fact that it’s emblematic of a completely insane phenomenon that’s taken hold in some conservative circles: the canonization of Ashli Babbitt as some sort of martyr.
Trump’s statement read,
I spoke to the wonderful mother and devoted husband of Ashli Babbitt, who was murdered at the hands of someone who should never have pulled the trigger of his gun. We know who he is. If that happened to the “other side,” there would be riots all over America and yet, there are far more people represented by Ashli, who truly loved America, than there are on the other side. The Radical Left haters cannot be allowed to get away with this. There must be justice!
Obviously, I don’t know what was said in Trump’s alleged conversation with Babbitt’s mother and husband, but I’m willing to bet the most important question the bereaved could have posed to Trump went unasked: Why did you lie to Ashli and every other American about the 2020 election being stolen from you?
Babbitt, of course, was the 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who stormed the Capitol on January 6. She was shot in the shoulder by an unidentified law enforcement officer as she tried to force her way through a barricaded door and succumbed to her wound. As Babbitt made clear on social media, her stated aim that day was to overturn the election she wrongly believed was rigged against Trump. On January 5, she tweeted, “Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!”
Put another way, she was attempting to violently end the republic when she was shot.
But you’d never know that going by the way some of the more odious personalities in conservative media are framing her death.
“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Tucker Carlson asked on his Fox News show in June while characterizing the riot as a mere protest. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”
Like Trump, Carlson has floated the possibility the 2020 was rigged.
Elsewhere on Fox News, last month Maria Bartiromo allowed Trump to spout nonsense in an interview about the 2020 election and January 6. He called the mob “peaceful people” and referenced a nonexistent “love in the air.” He then asked who shot Babbitt and called her “wonderful.” To that, the Fox News host replied, “That’s right” and also called her “wonderful.”
Over at Newsmax for a time, host Greg Kelly, another election conspiracy theorist, was running almost nightly segments on his show about Babbitt’s death. During one episode Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene even compared her killing to the murder of George Floyd. On another show, Rudy Giuliani suggested Babbitt’s death was part of a conspiracy, saying that “there’s a whole plot behind this.”
This is all batshit. Babbitt wasn’t an innocent protestor. She’s a dead insurrectionist. Her death is tragic in that the only reason she was at the Capitol that day is because Donald Trump’s ego couldn’t process the fact that Joe Biden booted his ass from the White House, and so he told himself and the country lies about the election.
The conservative spin about Babbitt’s death is part of a larger effort to downplay what happened at the Capitol on January 6. However half-baked the insurrection was, it was still an insurrection being perpetrated by a mob bent on ending American democracy.
One of the more deranged Republican attempts to downplay that day pertains to riots that have occurred elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in connection with racial unrest. A key Republican objection to the House select committee investigating the Capitol storming was that the investigation was not also examining riots that took place in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and other people of color at the hands of police.
This is a bad faith argument that totally elides one crucial detail: the United States Capitol is not a goddamn Apple store. The people who breached the Capitol on January 6 were not looking to make off with iPads and AirPods. They were there to overturn a presidential election and – if some of them had their way – hang the vice president of the United States while doing who-knows-what-else to any lawmakers they may have encountered. The Capitol is federal property and houses Congress, which was directly and deliberately threatened by the mob that day. It is not a strip mall shop that can file an insurance claim for lost or damaged property. We’re talking about the U.S. federal legislature here.
That is the fundamental point that the right wing’s hagiography of Babbitt misses. She stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop a peaceful and democratic transition of power, and she did so because she believed Trump’s bullshit about the 2020 election. At the end of the day, Ashli Babbitt died because she was gullible enough to believe the most mendacious and narcissistic bile merchant this country has ever elevated to high office.
Conservatives like Trump ask who shot Ashli Babbitt because it directs attention away from their own culpability in propagating the very lies that drove her to the Capitol and ultimately, her death.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
