Vinay Menon: After Paul Pelosi is attacked with a hammer, Donald Trump Jr. tries to nail down cheap political points

In his social media bios, Donald Trump Jr. says he is a “Meme War General.”

For once, he’s not lying through his bleached teeth. A scroll through his Instagram is an on-ramp to a superhighway of right-wing grievance and sophomoric memes masquerading as anti-woke humour. Junior, a silver spoon scion blessed with the intellectual heft and humanity of a ceramic tile, just wants to make liberals cry.

Fine. But there are things in this world that transcend partisan politics.

And getting attacked with a hammer is one of those things.

That is what happened to Paul Pelosi last week. The 82-year-old husband of Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the victim of a home invasion in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, his brain scrambled by dark conspiracies, broke through a patio door in search of Mrs. Pelosi while toting two hammers, tape, rope, rubber gloves and zip ties.

It seems safe to assume he was not there to prune or secure fern fronds.

According to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday, Mr. Pelosi was asleep in his bedroom when the suspect, David Wayne DePape, entered the premises calling out for Nancy like she was a missing cat. Mr. Pelosi managed to call 911. When officers arrived minutes later, “they encountered Paul Pelosi and DePape struggling over a hammer. Officers told the men to drop the hammer, and DePape allegedly gained control of the hammer and swung it, striking Pelosi in the head.”

DePape was restrained and arrested. Pelosi was unconscious with a skull fracture and in need of emergency surgery. The only proper response is total revulsion.

There are things, regardless of ideology, that should be easy to condemn.

Getting attacked with a hammer is one of those things.

But Junior thought the assault of a political spouse was kind of hilarious.

The Meme War General shared an image this week of a hammer and pair of tighty-whities, captioned with “got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” This was an allusion to a conspiracy theory that quickly spread in MAGA circles, falsely alleging Pelosi knew DePape. In this alternative reality, DePape was not a maniac on a kidnapping mission to literally kneecap Nancy Pelosi.

No, he was a male escort Mr. Pelosi hired before a lover’s quarrel got out of hand.

Junior wasn’t the only one playing footsies with misinformation. Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter, shared a link to a dubious story in the Santa Monica Observer, a fringe website that once claimed Hillary Clinton was dead and a doppelganger had debated Donald Trump. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out Monday: “With an official-sounding name and a professional-looking website, the Observer is one of a number of outlets masking themselves as legitimate news sources. The phenomenon has been growing and indicates how bad actors are increasingly trying to fool the public into seeing them as purveyors of accurate information.”

Musk and Junior have since deleted their posts, hastily retreating from the lunatic fringe. But it’s too late. The damage is done. Millions of rubes — like the suspect DePape himself — now have new conspiracies to rot their brains.

Would Junior think it was hilarious if a far-left lunatic broke into Mar-a-Lago to play the bongos on his father’s skull with an Edward Tools 16-Ounce Oak Claw Hammer? No, he would be horrified. All decent people would be horrified. This is what the MAGA cult does not grasp: political violence is apolitical in the aggregate.

It is not limited to one side. Republican Steve Scalise was shot five years ago at a softball game by a supporter of Bernie Sanders. The guy who plotted to assassinate Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh this summer was a liberal.

As Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University, told CNN: “We have a population that is unable to discern what is true and what’s not, and this spreading of misinformation from credible sources undermines that. People are willing to accept conspiracy theories when they reinforce the narrative they already hold in their head.”

Whatever you think of Nancy Pelosi, her husband should not be savaged with a hammer. This is not complicated, Junior. Not everything is a zero-sum game of hyperpartisanship. But since Junior doesn’t have lateral intelligence or many redeemable qualities, all he does is spread toxic waste, one meme at a time.

Sadly, I’m not sure anyone will be surprised if an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene is attacked by a member of the other tribe. The capacity to agree to disagree — my second favourite mantra behind live and let live — has vanished. We no longer debate. We demonize.

To those on the right, Nancy Pelosi is not just an oppositional figure — she is the Antichrist. And if something bad should happen to her husband, good riddance. This might explain some of the online chatter after the attack, including laments the suspect “did not finish the job.” Disgusting. And, again, not complicated.

But Junior and Musk are not doing backstrokes in fresh water. They want to muddy everything. Musk does so as an ostensible champion of free speech, unaware what he’s often freeing is nonsense. Junior does so for political theatre, twisting himself into a spittle pretzel every day to score partisan points and maybe, just maybe, get a pat on the head from daddy dearest.

I pray the Trump family never goes through what the Pelosi family just did.

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