On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) argued that the increase in attacks on government officials — including the attack on Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) that was allegedly perpetrated by a repeat offender and that Craig herself characterized as the inevitable result of giving a repeat offender lenient sentences and an attack on a staffer for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that was allegedly perpetrated by an offender who had gotten out of prison the day before — is the fault of former President Donald Trump and Republicans.
Host Erin Burnett asked, “[T]here has been a normalization. That’s part of the problem here. You heard Jeremy Diamond reporting that that intruder recently entered the U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s home in the middle of the night. He runs into this person. The Secret Service didn’t detect it. He didn’t feel that this person was threatening, but obviously, it’s still scary that it happened. But it comes as we are seeing a sharp uptick in cases that do have a clear, targeted motivation, right? The man who broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco house and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. He spent days in the hospital. The man who assaulted Democratic Congresswoman Angie Craig in the elevator of her apartment building in Washington. I remember talking to her about that, she’s sitting there trying to throw coffee on someone just to try to protect her family in that apartment. A staffer for Sen. Rand Paul, stabbed in Washington. And there are more examples that I’m not even listing here, many more in recent months. What do you think is fueling all of this, Congressman?”
Connolly answered, “I honestly believe that Donald Trump made violence part of his schtick. At rallies, you may recall, he actually talked about protestors and saying, in my day, we’d take them out and beat them up, enabling violence and almost sanctioning it. He walked around at one point with a baseball bat, not an image of peace and tranquility and conciliation. He, of course, incited the violence of January 6, and some of his enablers here in Congress have called those insurrectionists who perpetrated enormous violence on police forces and would’ve done the same on members of Congress, patriots or just overexcited tourists. When you say something like that, that’s not true. And it is normalizing and enabling violence. And for people who are living on the edge mentally, what they’re hearing is a steady stream of, violence is an acceptable route to express yourself or your anger. And I think we have to address that. That cannot be okay in a constitutional democracy like America.”
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