Nine people died as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that Republicans pretend was a "normal tourist visit." Four rioters and five police officers lost their lives during the attack or in its immediate aftermath, in ways that likely would not have happened but for the Capitol riot. This death toll is rarely discussed in the media coverage of the attack, likely because journalists don't want to argue with gaslighting fascists who want to get into bad faith debates about whether the assault "caused" the heart attacks and suicides that took lives. But there is one death that no one can deny was due to Jan. 6: That of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon-believing insurrectionist who was shot by a Capitol police officer as she attempted to lead a charge of rioters to run down fleeing members of Congress.
Instead of erasing her death in their efforts to pretend the riot was "peaceful," Donald Trump and his goons have turned the 36-year-old conspiracy theorist into a MAGA martyr. As with much of Trump's campaign antics, it calls back to the tactics of the Nazis, who turned a murdered scumbag named Horst Wessel into a fallen fascist hero honored in iconography and song. Babbitt is even easier to prop up as a sympathetic figure, she was both pretty and female.
Trump in particular likes to get maudlin, calling Babbitt an "innocent, wonderful, incredible woman." He also spent months demonizing the Capitol police officer, Michael Byrd, who was forced to shoot Babbitt that day. (Byrd's actions have been exonerated through multiple investigations, though anyone who has seen the footage of the shooting can see he had no choice.) Trump has suggested Byrd should face extra-legal execution, complaining, "if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung." It's language that should remind us that his "bloodbath" talk is both serious and literal.
So really, it should be bigger news that recently released testimony from a White House valet shows that Trump's reaction when told about Babbitt's death was utter indifference. It's buried in a New York Times report on this recently released transcript of an interview the anonymous valet did with the House committee investigating Jan. 6. The Times reporters are more focused on the valet's recollections of how Trump told his vice president, Mike Pence, that it would be "a political career killer" if Pence refused to steal the election for him. In passing, however, they also mention Trump did not care about Babbitt's killing — and the timeline suggests he understood perfectly well at the time that Babbitt was to blame for her own death.
As the transcript shows, the investigator asked the valet about a note that was given to Trump, shortly after the shooting, informing him that "1X civilian gunshot wound to chest at door of House Chamber." The valet affirmed that he saw Trump with the note, and that they also knew of the killing because it was being reported on cable news, which Trump was watching avidly throughout the riot.
"But there was no, like, reaction" to the news, the valet explained. Trump said nothing. But shortly after being informed, he did send out a tweet telling the insurrectionists "to remain peaceful, no violence," and to "[r]espect the law and our great men and women in blue."
Everyone understands — and understood at the time — that the tweet was just a CYA measure from Trump, who stubbornly refused for hours to ask the rioters to chill out, despite drinking in all the violent images on TV. But that he issued it after being told a supporter of his was shot makes it all the more clear that his main focus at the time was disavowing responsibility for the violence he fomented.
That Trump did not actually care about Babbitt's death, outside of fears that it made him look bad, is not a surprise to most Salon readers, journalists, or anyone who is honest about Trump's utter lack of morality. Perhaps this is why this revelation isn't getting more press attention. There's a tendency in the jaded press to assume "everyone" knows that Trump has never in his life cared about anyone but himself. But not all voters know that Trump is for-real sociopathic, and they may be surprised to find he reacted to a deluded woman dying for him like normal people react to stepping on an ant.
But this should be a huge story. Trump is making his phony concern about the fates of the January 6 insurrectionists the centerpiece of his campaign. He opens his rallies with elaborate ceremonies to honor the rioters, characterizes them as "hostages" and "unbelievable patriots," and promises pardons for people convicted of assaulting police and seditious conspiracy. He pretends to care about these people to valorize his selfish efforts to overthrow democracy. His feigned love of them is also about keeping up morale among the nastier members of the MAGA movement because Trump unsubtly expects them to use violence on his behalf again.
Trump's exploitation of Babbitt's is also part of a larger habit of faking outrage over imaginary threats to innocent white womanhood from dark-skinned men. Trump loves to brag that "I protect women," which is a lie like most words that come out of his face. But he definitely likes to share his elaborate fantasies of men of color raping and killing white women. That goes back to his 2015 campaign kickoff when he said Mexicans were "rapists." He has falsely declared that, because of immigration, "women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before." He's recently been hyping the murder of Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.
Trump's lurid obsession with violence against women is dishonest on two levels. First, he's lying about the racial dynamics of gendered violence. Most men who sexually abuse, beat or kill women target those they know, and who are usually of the same race. It's not the dark-skinned strangers lurking in bushes of Trump's imagination. Trump knows this personally, as nearly all the over two dozen women who have come out with stories of being sexually abused by him are white women who met him through normal work and social situations.
Thus, Trump not only doesn't care about violence against women, he's a big fan of it. He bragged about sexually assaulting women on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape. A New York jury found he did sexually assault journalist E. Jean Carroll in the 90s. He's repeatedly used the word "fortunately" when asked if he thinks rich men have the privilege of sexually assaulting whomever they wish. Over and over, Trump goes out of his way to defend other men who are accused of sexual harassment or abuse.
Babbitt's death is an outlier in the sense that she was the person at fault and gender had nothing to do with it. Still, Trump talks about her with the same tones of fake outrage he brings when exploiting the deaths and rapes of genuine victims. Pretending to suddenly care about violence against women when it suits his political needs is doubly gross, given Trump's otherwise lengthy record of cheerleading for gendered violence. But the mainstream media tends to avoid contrasting his pretend views on this issue with the substantial real-world evidence that he has no problem with violence against women.
The Babbitt case is especially egregious because, ultimately, her death is his fault. If Trump hadn't spun up ordinary people with lies about a "stolen" election, she wouldn't have been in the Capitol, foolishly dying for a man who does not care about her. That he's now using her corpse as a campaign prop is disgusting. Most MAGA voters will refuse to see this, of course, or make false claims that "all" politicians do it. But if they knew how little he cared, maybe a few would wake up and see that Trump would happily let them all die for him.
