The Commandante-in-Chief
By Lawrence Rosenthal
Donald Trump has achieved a status unique in American history: he is at once the head of the government and the head of the anti-government. It is impossible to separate his encouragement to the country’s right-wing militias from this week’s revelation of the “Wolverine Watchmen’s” plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
In his September 29 presidential debate with Joe Biden, in the midst of the interrupting, belligerent chaos he fomented, Trump had a shout-out to the country’s militia right. As though he were their commander, he issued orders to the “Proud Boys,” who have repeatedly marched armed on the streets of Portland and elsewhere: “Stand back and stand by!”
They responded. On the social media platform Telegram a member posted: “Standing down and standing by sir.” The head of the Proud Boys posted “That’s my president.” New shoulder patches were designed with the “Stand Back and Stand By” slogan.
Trump has provided a spark never dreamed of in the right-wing militia fantasy: a summons from the president.
For decades, the militia right in America has nursed a fantasy. They fancy themselves the nation’s “patriots,” and in their fantasy there is a spark — a moment, an event, an act — in response to which the patriots rise up armed and in mass. The fantasy goes back at least to the 1978 publication of William Pierce’s highly influential novel The Turner Diaries. There the spark was the “Cohen Act,” which confiscated private firearms across the country. By the end of the book, the U.S. government has been overthrown, nuclear war has ensued, and all non-whites and Jews on planet Earth have been exterminated.
The spark! Over the years, the militia movement has bred individuals who dream of being the hero who sets off the spark. In the white nationalist current of the militia movement, think Dylan Roof, who hoped to set off a race war when he murdered nine Blacks during Bible study in a Charleston church in 2015. In the anti-government current, the one that regards established government as tyrannical and illegitimate, think Timothy McVeigh who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people
But Trump has provided a spark never dreamed of in the right-wing militia fantasy: a summons from the president.
We have been through an extraordinary spring and summer in the USA, when a pair of movements, one right after the other, have put demonstrators in the streets accompanied by the presence of armed militias. First were the anti-lockdown demonstrations, protesting against “elite” scientific opinion on the basis of a kind of populist epidemiology, and which challenged local and state Covid19 regulations as unjust restrictions of personal liberty. This was followed by the George Floyd protests, which have spawned an increasingly belligerent militia confrontation with Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
In each of these protest movements, Donald Trump has egged on the right-wing militias in the streets. In April, he sent out his LIBERATE tweets, encouraging protesters in Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia to defy state orders on social distancing. In one of his tweets he added a come-on to the fiercely gun-loving anti-government militias, explicitly tying the protests to the militia’s most symbolic issue: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
Today, Richard Spencer’s Weimar II vision — Americans terrorized by a violent Left, defended by vigilante white nationalists — has become the dominant narrative of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
In May, with Trumpian green-lighting, protests against stay-at-home orders escalated into armed militias — which included some of the participants in the Wolverine Watchmen kidnap plot — storming the Michigan state capitol. The state legislature canceled its session, and Trump called the militias “very good people.” It was during the protests here and in Minneapolis that America was introduced to the “accelerationists,” like the “Boogaloo Bois,” who were already speaking openly of a second American Civil War.
Before the George Floyd demonstrations, the white-nationalist militia current had hit the doldrums after the failure of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The unified right-wing militia they previewed in their chanting (“Jews will not replace us”) nighttime tiki-torch march did not take off, but the vision behind it remained. Richard Spencer, the so-called founder of the Alt-Right and one of the Charlottesville organizers, made that vision explicit. In his view, the U.S. had moved into “Weimar,” the brief period in post-World War I Germany when the Nazi movement rose to power. What made Weimar special for Spencer? That politics had devolved into street fighting, an extreme Nazi Right versus an extreme Left. People were forced to choose one side or the other.
Transcribing this scenario to the U.S., Spencer absurdly raised Antifa, a petty, ragtag collection of police provocateurs, into a uniformed armed force that mirrored the militia right. Donald Trump, the right-wing media and the Republican Party have swallowed whole this definition of the situation. In the wake of Charlottesville Trump had called Antifa the “alt-left.” By the end of May this year Trump tweeted “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” This, despite the FBI, other federal agencies and independent experts on terrorism recognizing white nationalists as the greatest terrorist threat the country faces.
In August when Kyle Rittenhouse shot three protesters in Kenosha, two shot dead, Trump suggested he had acted in self-defense. Back in Charlottesville, when James Fields ran his car over protesters, killing one, Richard Spencer had called it an act of self-defense. Today, Richard Spencer’s Weimar II vision — Americans terrorized by a violent Left, defended by vigilante white nationalists — has become the dominant narrative of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
As the head of the government, Trump has mounted forces who have cleared Lafayette Park in Washington and have been deployed on the streets of Portland. These forces cut their teeth serving on the “emergency” on the U.S.-Mexican border where respect for individual rights has been a vanishing principle. But all along, Trump has conflated his government forces — who have appeared on occasion without identifying insignia — with “his” vigilante forces, or as he put it in March 2019, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people.”
As the well-worn cliché goes, the American president wears a number of hats. One of these hats is Commander-in Chief of the nation’s armed forces. At the presidential debate, Donald Trump fitted the American president with a new hat, one previously unthinkable under any other administration. He became the Commandante-in-Chief of America’s vigilante militias. Commandante Trump issued his orders while President Trump undermined the legitimacy of the swiftly arriving presidential election, refusing to agree to accept the election results. Little over a week later, the Watchmen plot in Michigan was exposed.
Lawrence Rosenthal is chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and the author or Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism (The New Press).
