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It was just 11 days ago when a man allegedly broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and violently attacked her husband, fracturing his skull with a hammer and putting Paul Pelosi in intensive care. Initially, Donald Trump couldn’t be bothered to say anything about the incident.
A few days later, the former president acknowledged the violence by complaining about crime rates in San Francisco and Chicago. Soon after, the Republican did what he nearly always does, embracing a bonkers conspiracy theory and telling the public, in reference to the alleged crime at the Pelosi household, “The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out, so it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out.”
None of this was true. As we’ve discussed, the details Trump presented as true are contradicted, not only by revelations released by law enforcement, but also by literal camera footage from the Capitol Police’s security cameras, which prove the former president’s claims false.
This week, Trump, chastened after this humiliating turn of events, quickly changed direction.
No, I’m just kidding. What the Republican actually did was turn up the heat and intensify his offensive against the Democratic congressional leader. At an event in Miami on Sunday, Trump mocked Pelosi, called her “crazy,” and laughed as his supporters chanted “lock her up” in reference to the House Speaker.
Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan noted soon after, “A braying authoritarian mob calls for the imprisonment of the other party’s legislative leader days after an attempt to take her hostage and torture her. What would you say if you saw it in another country?”
A day later, as Politico reported, the former president targeted Pelosi with a new insult.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “an animal,” days after her husband was attacked with a hammer by a man charged with seeking to kidnap the speaker. “I think she’s an animal, too, to tell you the truth,” Trump said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio, on behalf of Republican candidates on the eve of the midterm elections, before referring to Pelosi and the House impeaching him twice.
Justifying his dehumanizing rhetoric, the Republican told his Ohio audience, “She impeached me twice for nothing!”
First, the grounds for Trump’s impeachments were entirely legitimate. He extorted a foreign ally in the hopes that it would help him cheat in an election, and he then incited an insurrectionist riot, deploying radicals to attack his own country’s Capitol. This wasn’t “nothing.”
Second, it wasn’t just Pelosi who was responsible for the impeachments. In the second process, 17 members of Trump’s own party voted against him.
And third, Paul Pelosi is still recovering from a violent attack. It’s against this backdrop that Trump decided the appropriate move would be to call Nancy Pelosi an “animal” days after he was caught peddling an insane conspiracy theory that was quickly discredited.
Trump keeps facing important tests of his character and capacity for human decency, and he keeps failing them.