Juan Williams: Hatred and lies are winning in a landslide

Don’t wait for Tuesday’s votes. The results are already in.

Hateful lies and violence are winning. 

Trumpian politicians pushing the fear button on race, crime and immigration feel good about the polls. The money is piling up. They will continue trashing our government and our elections long after midterm votes are counted.

A GOP-controlled House is widely predicted by polls. Already, news reports point to election-deniers in a GOP majority engaging in a feeding frenzy of lies and conspiracies, beginning with endless, Benghazi-like investigations into President Biden’s son, Hunter. 

Forget doing hard work on policies to help the economy.

A Republican majority will be busy demeaning the president and circulating conspiracy theories favored by violent right-wing groups.

The dots are there for everyone to connect.

Threats of violence against members of the House and Senate have jumped from less than a thousand in 2016 — the year of Trump’s election — to nearly 10,000 in 2021, according to Capitol police. 

There have also been deadly attacks at the far-right gathering in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, and at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

Then came the January 6 violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. 

And threats to election workers continue. Now add in the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). 

Speaker Pelosi is constantly demonized by Republicans and Trump extremists. Trump has publicly defamed her as a “disgrace,” and “crazy Nancy.”

The man who attacked Pelosi’s husband drove home that point by allegedly asking “Where’s Nancy?” He later reportedly told police he wanted to kidnap her and use a hammer to break her kneecaps.

Trump has a long record of toying with personal attacks that invite violence.

Trump has told his followers that Biden is the “enemy of the state,” and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a political “death wish.”

That kind of language led Hillary Clinton to rightly ask during an MSNBC interview last week why Americans would vote for candidates linked to a man who is “stirring up these violent feelings…making a joke about a violent attack on Paul Pelosi? Why would you trust that person to have power over you, your family, your business, your community?”

Clinton answered her own question by saying there are politicians who don’t care about violence if “they think it will somehow get them votes that will get them elected. This is a real threat to the heart of our democracy.” 

Former President Obama is making the same point. 

If politicians continue with “over-the-top rhetoric… if they encourage their supporters to stand outside voting places armed with guns and dressed in tactical gear, if that’s the environment that we create, more people are going to get hurt,” Obama said at a campaign rally last week. 

But the vitriol continues to flow from Trump’s loyalists.

According to Politico, a political advertisement from a group created by former Trump officials asked Georgia voters in threatening tones: “When did racism against white people become OK?” 

It then claimed Biden “put white people last in line for Covid relief funds” — apparently a reference to innocuous comments made in 2021 about making minority-owned and female-owned businesses a “priority.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on the various “voting-related falsehoods and rumors” flourishing on social media before the election.

The Times said false social media posts about “rigged” voting machines, ballot fraud, and unauthorized immigrants voting are plainly intended to “undermine confidence in voting.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote last week that not all Republicans are like Trump. But he warned that “MAGA Republicans, and their leader, are drowning out the voices of reason within their party while they erode American democracy.”

“In fact, many on the right are all too willing to exploit this extremism – and resulting division – for political gain,” Thompson wrote on CNN’s website. 

Thompson noted that since Trump became a candidate in 2015, the number of “domestic terrorism plots or attacks,” have reached “an all-time high,” and 80 percent of the attacks have been the work of “right-wing extremists.”

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security recently warned in an internal memo that there is an elevated risk of even more violence around Tuesday’s election. One major rationale for that violence, according to the government memo, would be “perceptions of election-related fraud.”

As voters prepare to cast their ballot tomorrow, they would do well to remember the words of a conservative retired federal judge, J. Michael Luttig.

The lifelong conservative, in testimony before the House Select Committee on January 6, warned that Trump and his supporters are preparing in open sight an “attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election.”

“A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge,” Luttig warned.

“Almost two years after that fateful day … Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said. 

Luttig was right. The potential for outbreaks of violence by Trump’s supporters remains a clear and present danger. 

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.