The foul odor of TDS is definitely in the air when the editor of the Washington Monthly, published on the pages of Friday's Atlantic magazine website, can somehow connect the actions of an enraged Democrat congressman in 1856 caning anti-slavery Republican Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate to President Donald Trump.
The author of the hit piece incorporating an incident from a couple of centuries ago is careful to discount the idea of making historical comparisons but that was exactly what Rob Wolfe did in "The Vicious Beating That Reshaped America."
First Wolfe fills the readers in on some of the details of the infamous 1856 Democrat upon Republican attack before turning his ire on his real target:
On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks, a young representative from South Carolina, confronted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts during a visit to the upper chamber. Sumner, known for his fiery abolitionist orations, had recently given a speech leveling insults at Brooks’s kinsman Senator Andrew P. Butler, including that he consorted with “the harlot, Slavery.”
Suddenly, Brooks began raining down blows on Sumner with a gutta-percha cane while an accomplice warded off lawmakers who tried to intervene. Sumner’s long legs were trapped under his bolted-down desk; the best he could do was raise his arms. Brooks beat him until the cane splintered in his hand, and then, even after the desk was wrenched free, he kept going. Finally, bystanders pulled the men apart. Sumner barely escaped death; his head and shoulders were slashed to the bone. One of America’s best legal thinkers had just been chastised like a farm animal.
...Today, political violence is again on the rise. Angry, alienated men have taken shots at the president, stormed the Capitol, and attacked state legislators in their home.
So nice of Wolfe to mention that shots were taken AT Trump and yet his conclusion is that the President is somehow the perpetrator of such violence:
"Donald Trump’s insistence that calling him an authoritarian puts him in physical danger recalls those southerners who treated sharp challenges as fighting words."
And there you have it. Wolfe is essentially claiming that Donald Trump is at fault for the violence directed at him. Oh, and the crazies are not merely calling him an authoritarian, they are loudly proclaiming him, over and over, to be another Hitler thus justifying the violence.
Exit question: Will the would be Trump assassin at the White House Correspondents Dinner be given a copy of Wolfe's Trump as violent Democrat article to read as he sits in his cell awaiting trial?
