Last week’s attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the couple’s San Francisco home, represents another in a long regress of stress tests for American democracy. And as at past such inflection points—the January 6 insurrection, the mobilization of a vast corps of election-denying and conspiracy-mongering candidates in the GOP, the pillaging of social media platforms by feckless billionaires—the system is showing every sign of impending breakdown. An assassination attempt targeting the person third in line for the presidency—Paul Pelosi’s hammer-wielding assailant, David LePape, reportedly shouted “Where is Nancy?” the same refrain raised by January 6 rioters vandalizing the Speaker’s office—largely registered as a regrettable and over-ardent propaganda-by-deed within key segments of the American right, if not indeed another conspiracy targeted at their movement.
Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin, out stumping for Virginia congressional candidate Yesli Vega in the homestretch of election season, saw fit to joke about the assault; after a pro forma disclaimer denouncing political violence, he said of the house Speaker, “we’re going to send her back” to be with her seriously injured husband. The crowd applauded. Fox News, meanwhile, stoutly hewed to general GOP policy messaging amid news of the assault; contributor Leo Terrell announced that the attack should serve as a “wakeup call” to permissive liberal Democrats like Pelosi on crime—as though Democrats were withholding approval of hammer-counterinsurgency measures in the nation’s police departments.
By the weekend, Donald Trump Jr. had repurposed this phony talking point into a rally-grade demagogic slogan, tweeting “Imagine how safe the country would be if the democrats [sic] took all violent crime as seriously as they’re taking the Paul Pelosi situation. They just don’t care about you.” GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, in what now passes for statesmanlike conduct on the right, weighed in with a dogmatic-yet-content-free pronouncement clearly aimed at providing cover for rampant speculative nuttery: “I don’t know what the hell happened at Nancy Pelosi’s house and I suspect none of us will ever know for sure,” he tweeted. “But I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right winger is absurd and will always be absurd.”
Other party influencers sought to harness both violent Q fantasies and a rapidly burgeoning (and Elon Musk-endorsed) conspiracy theory about the attack on the right, holding that the alleged attacker and Paul Pelosi were lovers: former Trump treasury official and Nixon amanuensis Monica Crowley darkly tweeted that “The Pelosi house is the kind of place that looks normal from the outside but has all kinds of crazy-ass stuff going on behind closed doors.”
