Jokes about Paul Pelosi aren’t just in bad taste. They normalize political violence | Arwa Mahdawi

What do you do when an 82-year-old man is attacked at his home with a hammer? You laugh about it, of course. A number of Republicans – people who like to preach to others about family values and civility – seem to find the recent attack on Paul Pelosi very amusing indeed.

Donald Trump Jr, for example, posted a meme on Sunday night showing a pair of underwear and a hammer next to the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” On Monday night, the self-proclaimed “Meme Wars General” doubled down on his post, which referenced a baseless conspiracy theory about Pelosi and put up another crude meme mocking the attack.

Either Trump Jr is capable of feeling shame or someone talked some sense into him. In any case, the former president’s son has deleted those memes. He’s replaced them with a message cynically politicizing the assault on Pelosi instead. “Imagine how safe the country would be if democrats took all violent crime as seriously as they’re taking the Paul Pelosi situation,” he posted. “They simply don’t care.” Trump Jr, it should be said, can always be relied on to react to a situation in incredibly bad taste.

The only reason it’s worth mentioning his disgusting comments is because he wasn’t alone in mocking Pelosi. Far from it. On Monday, Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, drew laughter at a campaign event with a joke about security at the Pelosi residence. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, drew criticism from Democrats on Friday after a comment he made while Pelosi was in hospital that appeared to make light of the attack. And on Monday, Claudia Tenney, a Republican who represents a district in central New York, tweeted a picture of a group of men holding hammers for Halloween with the caption “LOL”.

I’ll be fair here. Not everyone on the right mocked the attack on Pelosi. Some spread misinformation about it and some minimized it instead. Elon Musk, self-proclaimed “Chief Twit” of Twitter, posted a link to a baseless conspiracy theory about Pelosi, then deleted it. Meanwhile the rightwing commentator Dinesh D’Souza crowed: “The Left is going crazy because not only are we not BUYING the wacky, implausible Paul Pelosi story but we are even LAUGHING over how ridiculous it is.” On Monday, Charlie Kirk, a rightwing pundit, called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out 42-year-old David DePape, who is accused of perpetrating the attack on Pelosi. It seems, alarmingly, that there may be an appetite on the right to turn DePape into the next Kyle Rittenhouse and make him a hero.

FBI agents work outside the Pelosi home. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

You wouldn’t think it from looking at the Republican reaction but it can’t be stressed enough how serious the attack on Pelosi was. Were it not for the fact that he managed to make a secret 911 call from the bathroom, the House speaker’s husband, who suffered skull injuries, might have fared a lot worse.

It has also been reported that DePape was looking for Nancy Pelosi and was planning to hold her hostage and break her kneecaps because he saw her as “the leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic party. There’s nothing remotely funny about any of this. Republicans should be united in their condemnation of politically motivated violence and pledge to find ways to turn down America’s political temperature.

It goes without saying that, had a Republican politician been the subject of the attack, they’d be demanding that Democrats do just that. There was more Republican outrage about the time the supreme court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had his steak dinner interrupted by protesters than there was about the attack on Pelosi. And there was certainly a lot more outrage when Kavanaugh was the subject of an unsuccessful assassination attempt earlier this year.

The fact that so many on the right felt comfortable joking about the attack demonstrates the extent to which extremism has become accepted

Kavanaugh, by the way, has been brought up a lot by Republican politicians who are pushing the talking point that “both sides” are to blame for political violence. Senator Tom Cotton, for instance, condemned the attack on Pelosi but also said: “You see deranged lunatics attack both Democrats and Republicans alike,” mentioning the alleged attempt in June by 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske to assassinate Kavanaugh.

It’s certainly true that there are unhinged people across the political spectrum and politicians from both sides have been targeted for violence. However, “both-sidesing” this issue is dangerously dishonest. Both sides aren’t engaging in inflammatory rhetoric: that’s very much the Republicans’ area of expertise. Both sides don’t have a history of encouraging their supporters to storm the Capitol. Both sides aren’t pushing lies that the 2020 election was stolen. Both sides don’t turn people like Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two protesters, into folk heroes. Both sides don’t glorify political violence. Both sides aren’t using an attack on an 82-year-old to generate laughs on the campaign trail.

The Republican reaction to the attack on Pelosi feels like a watershed moment in US politics. The fact that so many on the right felt comfortable joking about the attack demonstrates the extent to which extremism has become accepted and political violence has been normalized. Pelosi may be on the road to recovery, but American democracy is going down a very dark path.