Speaking of the attempted assassination of former President and current U.S. Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump on Saturday, July 13, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene (one of the state’s Republican representatives to the U.S. Congress) declared that Trump survived because God’s hand was on the candidate that day.
The American spirit, she declared on Monday, July 15, is alive and well. She called Trump the “founding father of the America First movement.”
These religiously-tinged words came in the midst of an address the Representative made to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She went on from there to say that, just two days before, “evil” had attempted to take from them the man that members of that movement “admire and love.” Divine protection, however, thwarted the shooter’s plans. Today was therefore, she declared, a day of celebration for her movement and political party even as it came in the midst of a “somber moment” for the United States.
The shooter who attempted to take Trump out of the Presidential race has been named by authorities as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a twenty year-old registered Republican with a history of making donations to Democratic political action committees. In closed-primary states like Pennsylvania, it is not unusual for those whose hearts are with one party to register across party lines in order to vote in primaries against candidates whom they find particularly objectionable, with the aim of knocking them out of the race before the general election. Crooks fired several shots, one of which struck the former President’s ear.
In her speech, Greene raised the troubling possibility that Democrats “wanted this to happen,” as pundits attached to their party have been talking publicly for years about their view that Trump is a danger to their values and should be regarded as something akin to a Nazi. The escalating rhetoric, Greene said, amounts to calling for an assassination. “Listen,” she said, “to their words.”
