A MAGA gunman in New Mexico and ‘the end of politics’ in America

He is becoming the Wolfman Jack of political violence and strongman fascism in America, blasting his hate-filled rants at the 21st-century equivalent of 150,000 watts, on a frequency that clears the mighty Mississippi and hurdles the Rocky Mountains and lands in small towns and far-flung cities — his ugly riffs on executing U.S. generals or threatening judges or shutting down news outlets cheered and shared by an audience that’s counted in the millions.

When Donald Trump howls into his metaphorical microphone, it’s on a frequency that gets picked up by the likes of Ryan Martinez, a 23-year-old man living in Sandia Park, N.M., a small-town suburb of Albuquerque. Martinez’s Facebook page says he’s a graduate of Los Lunas High School, and, according to the Albuquerque Journal, his bio reads: “(expletive) The Chinese Communist Party and (expletive) Joe Biden. TRUMP WON. (pre-law major).”

The legal education — if that part is real — could come in handy for Martinez, whose social media profile also includes Trumpian rants about the Big Lie of election fraud, as well as a photo of his political idol with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un. On Thursday, the young Trump fan, wearing his “Make America Great Again” hat, went to nearby Española as a counterprotester against Indigenous New Mexicans and left-wing allies angry over the county government’s plan to reinstall a controversial statue of a Spanish conquistador, Juan de Oñate.

Martinez reportedly argued with and baited the largely Native American protesters at the event before a scuffle broke out, knocking off Martinez’s red cap. As captured vividly by an Albuquerque photojournalist, the young man then pulled out a handgun and began shooting, striking and wounding an out-of-state environmental activist and member of the Hopi tribe named Jacob Johns. Police who arrested Martinez said he laughed and smirked through an interview.

It’s small consolation that no one was killed during Martinez’s rampage. Hardly the first episode of political violence tied closely to the MAGA movement, it surely will not be the last. Especially when this fish stinks from the head. The New Mexico shooting marked the end of a week in which Donald Trump repeatedly celebrated violence, making it clear that death, injury and intimidation isn’t a side effect of his authoritarian push to return to the White House, but the primary disease.

The overwhelming front-runner for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination even visited South Carolina’s Palmetto State Armory, a massive gun emporium that was in the news just weeks earlier for selling an AR-15 to a racist gunman who etched a swastika onto the handle and used it to hunt down Black people in a Dollar General store, killing three of them. That fact didn’t deter the four-times-indicted Trump, who held and admired a Glock pistol burnished with his own image and sent mixed signals about whether he was buying it, alarming federal prosecutors.

Trump’s celebration of gun culture was sandwiched between some stunning remarks. The first was an assault on the nation’s outgoing Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, in which he ranted that a Milley phone call with Chinese brass while Trump was melting down after his 2020 election was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” On Friday, the would-be 47th president told California Republicans that shoplifters should be shot and killed and then celebrated another act of violence by a supporter, 2022′s hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Democratic House leader.

“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump told a state party convention. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” The crowd laughed and Trump smirked — just like Martinez, the New Mexico shooter.

Trump is playing a dangerous game, and there is a name for it: Stochastic terrorism. The cries for vengeance and violent retribution from the leader of the MAGA movement aren’t a message to anyone in specific but rather a bat signal to everyone who can hear his voice, whether it’s armed and troubled young men like Martinez or the Jacksonville gunman, or the angry mob that responded on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump tweeted, “Will be wild!”

This undercurrent of violence and rage has always been there — Trump was urging fans to “knock the crap out of” hecklers when he first ran in 2015 — but it is increasingly front and center as MAGA evolves from a cult of personality around a reality-TV star into a full-blown fascist-style movement. After Trump’s South Carolina gun shop excursion, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on dictators, wrote that now “his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.”

The gunplay in New Mexico was a powerful manifestation of that. Yet it received little news coverage, in a week in which the United States seemed to be unraveling on all sides. On Capitol Hill, a band of Republican nihilists with no agenda beyond inducing chaos came within hours of shutting down the government, and did manage to please a different dictator, in Russia’s Vladimir Putin, by shutting off U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, many of the same Trump allies launched a hearing for an utterly fact-free impeachment of President Joe Biden. The thread running through all these stories is the same: Facts, or truth, or basic functions like keeping the government open, or the quaint idea that our problems can be solved peacefully ... none of those things matter in a nation they are determined to break, so that a strongman named Trump, alone, can fix it.

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While this is happening, the guardians of the American way — establishment politicians, and especially the news media — are desperately trying to pretend that we are going into a normal presidential campaign cycle. The latest example was a so-called Republican debate held Wednesday at the Reagan Library in California, a setting meant to invoke gravitas. But Trump, with 55-60% support, didn’t even feel it was necessary to show up and the seven dwarfs on the stage barely criticized him, afraid to trigger the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement — and hardly anyone watched.

But when the debate was over, something surprising happened. A gaggle of the top anchors at MSNBC had a lightbulb moment — that they were trying to do political analysis when they are watching what they called “the end of politics.” That’s when a movement that’s lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — and is watching its antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ extremism alienate the next generation of voters — is determined to hold power by any means necessary.

Even if that’s the power that grows out of the barrel of a gun.

“What’s happening in Republican politics right now,” MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow opined, “is that the Republican Party, the Republican base, the Republican electorate, has effectively decided that they don’t really want to do politics anymore, and they’re not all that interested in what politics is, and governing and political campaigning and policy competition and all that stuff, they’re not interested in that.” So what do they want? “They would prefer a strongman who is going to end politics.”

Her fellow panelists agreed that Democrats are struggling to understand this, but so is the mainstream media that they belong to. Said MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “The media can’t figure out how to do something other than conventional politics from the ‘90s, so they say, ‘Both sides, both sides, both sides.’ If we say, ‘Donald Trump is corrupt,’ well, we have to cover Hunter Biden equally, we have to even-steven it and find something to say ...”

The fact that left-leaning-but-ultimately mainstream MSNBC was having this “end of politics” conversation was a step in the right direction. So was Biden’s speech on democracy delivered the next day at an event honoring his Republican friend the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, where he said, “We have to stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence because we know MAGA extremists have already proven they won’t.” An arguably more powerful statement came the next day from Milley, the retiring general, who declared that America’s troops are only loyal to the Constitution, that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

No one needed to ask who that wannabe dictator is, although clueless Mike Pence and the other career politicians and media hacks whose paychecks depend on not hearing the only fire alarm that matters today, the five-alarm siren of rising fascism, still pretend not to understand.

Time is running out to decide whether to reinvest in a 247-year-old idea of a government by and for the people, or to conduct government at the end of a Glock. The question isn’t whether a majority of Americans want to be ruled by the barrel of a gun — they don’t — but whether that majority can find the energy and the unity to fight back. Meanwhile, the echoes from the gunshots in a New Mexico courtyard are getting louder and louder.

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