#Opinion: What violent threats against the Jim Jordan holdouts tell us about the GOP

Editor’s Note: John Avlon is a CNN senior political analyst and anchor. He is the author of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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Threats begin when reason fails.

The failed full-court press to install Republican Rep. Jim Jordan as House Speaker revealed ugly examples of how violent threats are becoming normalized inside Trump’s GOP.

After Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa switched her vote on Wednesday to oppose Jordan, she issued a statement saying she received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls.”

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told NBC that he’d received death threats as well.  According to Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, the strategy behind the threats is to “Attack, attack, attack. Attack the members who don’t agree with you, attack them, beat them into submission.”

This is the opposite of anything resembling deliberative democracy or politics in a civil society. (Jim Jordan, who dropped out of the race for speaker on Friday after a secret ballot found he had lost the support of his fellow Republicans as the party’s choice, condemned the death threats, saying, “It’s just wrong.”)

One voicemail in particular, left for the wife of an unnamed conservative congressman — played exclusively on our colleague Jake Tapper’s show — offers a portrait of the pathology that has driven the GOP into this ditch.

The caller, an aggrieved man, lets loose in a tirade that needs a close reading.

The unhinged caller begins with a lot of furious cursing and standard dehumanization — describing the anonymous congressman as a “pig” because he publicly opposed Jordan. The voicemail continues, with the caller suggesting that the principled decision was due to the influence of the “deep state.” This is a tell that the caller has been drinking from the right-wing media well.

But that’s basic compared to his threats to “come follow you all over the place. We’re going to be up your ass. F––king nonstop. We are now Antifa. We’re going to do what the left does.”

This is a small masterpiece of projection — one that we’ve seen before in the right’s baseless claims that the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol was not the work of conservative Trump supporters, but members of the leftist group Antifa. In the run-up to that attack, members of the Proud Boys even bragged that they could dress up as Antifa.

The bogeyman that is the fear of Antifa has become mainstream, with conservatives often invoking the group or other figures they associate with the left as a scapegoat for or distraction from violent actions on the right — a tactic sometimes called “aggressive defensiveness.”

It’s not the only illogical mind-bender. The caller repeatedly uses an anti-gay slur to describe the congressman to his (*checks notes*) wife, reflecting the insecure mindset that masquerades as being uber macho, accusing those who are more left-leaning as being gay and therefore weak in that twisted worldview.

That’s not all. The fanatic threatening violence also accuses the congressman of being a “warmongering piece of s–-t”— perhaps reflecting the post-Trump isolationist impulses on the far-right. In the next breath, however, he says that the war in Israel creates moral urgency to push through a Jim Jordan speakership.

Then comes the threat of doxxing. The caller says that he and unnamed others are uploading the wife’s personal contact information to the internet to guarantee more harassment. This is a fear-based play from a crank who wants to seem like a member of the majority by intimidating people he disagrees with.

Any sense that this was a random unhinged person without a partisan political agenda was demolished by his demand that the congressman vote for “Jim Jordan or more conservative.” This caller has explicit right-wing ideological demands.

If the wife doesn’t succeed in switching the congressman’s vote, he promises that “you’re going to be f–-king molested like you can’t ever imagine.”

Molested. As in sexually assaulted. And then, after a beat in which you can practically hear the gears turning in his head, the caller says, “And again, non-violently.” This is a cynical move of the kind that allows January 6th apologists to point to Trump saying the armed crowd should march on the capitol “peacefully.” It is a legalistic non-sequitur designed to distract from obvious intent.

The reason I’ve run through all the elements of this threat-scape is because it reflects live-wire associations from the far-right media ecosystem. The disparate threads are all there, with the intent of intimidating people to do their will — turning over more power to the far-right.

It didn’t work this time. But it has in the past. After the attack on the Capitol, a Republican member of Congress told a colleague he was afraid to vote to certify the election, despite his personal, fact-based belief that Biden’s win was legitimate, because he was afraid for the safety of his family.

Similar fears drove Republicans to not vote their conscience in Trump’s second impeachment. As former Congresswoman Liz Cheney told CNN, “If you look at the vote to impeach, for example, there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.”

So while it’s notable that this effort to strongarm support for Jim Jordan failed, the attempt to normalize threats of violence are still ongoing. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who the House select committee on January 6 found sent text messages confirming his involvement in the plot to overturn the 2020 election results, dismissed the death threats as being a “red herring.”

Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, reported that Jordan ally Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio said behind closed doors that it wasn’t Jordan’s fault that members of Congress were getting death threats; they had brought it upon themselves by opposing him.

This is the politics that Donald Trump’s rhetoric has wrought among his supporters in the Republican Party. It reflects the furious worldview that right-wing media sells to keep its listeners addicted to the anger and anxiety, turning much of the GOP into what Utah Sen. Mitt Romney calls “a pro-authoritarian party.”

These threats of violence often use fear, promising elected officials not just physical harm, but the loss of power, reinforced by the secondary threat that they will lose their partisan primaries if they don’t bow to the base.

This is unsustainable. But coming forward and refusing to be intimidated is a step toward breaking this hyper-partisan fever. It is a hopeful sign that Jordan couldn’t ultimately win even a majority of the Republican caucus when it was put to a secret ballot. Bullies only respect strength — and threats are really admissions of weakness, if they are called out with the confidence that comes from moral clarity and a determination to defend our democracy.