Trump Finds His Sergei Kirov in Ashlii Babbitt

Tyrannical movements search for martyrs with desert-like thirst. Hitler found his in Horst Wessel; Stalin had Sergei Kirov.

Donald Trump has Ashlii Babbitt.

The woman who was shot trying to lead a mob through a broken window to attack members of Congress on January 6 was lionized by Trump in a video message to her family celebrating her birthday. Trump combined nuclear-level revisionism with a demand that the investigation in Babbitt’s death be re-opened.

Trump expressed no similar sympathy for the police officers who were injured or killed as a result of events on 1/6.

One might think that the former president’s bizarre rants on one of his violent followers becoming an insurrection casualty would not be news anymore, but in combination with other events, it was a reminder of how dangerous the Republican party has become.

The day before Trump dropped this video, he demanded the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives allow a vote on a “forensic audit” of the election in Texas – a state Trump won by over half a million votes.

In between these two events, the number two ranking Republican in the federal House refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election.

Put it all together and it means the only thing preventing folks like Amanda Chase or Jarome Bell from turning Virginia’s election infrastructure inside out for phantom “fraud” is a Democrat in the Governor’s Mansion – and that’s just what we can look “forward” to next year. Come 2024, as Trump himself tries to reclaim power, how much can we really trust our votes to be counted by the likes of Glenn Youngkin’s friends?

These are not questions we would need to ask ourselves in normal elections. Far too many people so desperately want it to be normal that they’re pretending it is.

It’s not.