ABC News Political Director Rick Klein called for the “cleansing” of Trump supporters Thursday following the Capitol Hill chaos, which featured the president’s loyal followers storming the complex.
“Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part,” Klein wrote in a since-deleted post on Twitter, which already banned the president for 12 hours after the riots and teed up a permanent suspension. “Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.”
Political Director for @ABC News based in Washington DC appears to have deleted his tweet about the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump that talked about the challenge of "cleansing the movement." pic.twitter.com/HS1Rwrn94S
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) January 7, 2021
Klein’s calls for cleansing are reminiscent of leftist demands to reprimand the 74 million Americans who voted for the president in the November election last year.
You can't heal or reform the GOP who are now an extremist party. They have to be broken, burned down and rebuilt. When Biden is in power treat them like the active threats to democracy they are. If those who committed crimes aren't punished then they will be more emboldened.
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) November 10, 2020
Lol at the “party of personal responsibility” being upset at the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 6, 2020
Former Pete Buttigieg staffer and Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan responded to New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s request for GOP punishment by touting the “Trump Accountability Project,” creating lists “to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.”
You better believe it. We just launched the Trump Accountability Project to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did. https://t.co/clRu6WSfvL https://t.co/J78dgyHJpG
— Hari Sevugan (@HariSevugan) November 6, 2020
Warning to publishers considering signing someone who led a campaign to get Americans to hate each other – you will face a massive boycott led by the Trump Accountability Project. Not just of this book but your whole library.https://t.co/7z4tDKsSQb@mbsimon @emabrams https://t.co/YyKTQQonWl
— Hari Sevugan (@HariSevugan) November 6, 2020
The calls for widespread punishment have only undermined Democrats’ claims that they are promoting unity, exposing their lip service to a deeply divided nation.
The destruction Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where thousands of Trump supporters flooded congressional hallways in a day of unrest that claimed the lives of four people, came as a symptom of the nation’s ills. Blaming the 74 million Americans for provoking the insurrection reveals a profound misunderstanding of the events that traumatized a scarred nation still recovering from the near-dystopian nightmares of the last 12 months.
Here’s what Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech wrote in The Transom republished in The Federalist Thursday:
A comment from an apolitical friend who wandered into the room where the roiling crowd was on the screen in the early afternoon yesterday: “Is that Black Lives Matter?” No, it’s not — but also, it is. An apolitical viewer of the summer of 2020 would learn one distinct lesson: If you want to be heard, if you want to be listened to, you need to go into the streets, make a ruckus, set things on fire, and tear down icons of America. This disrespect will be welcomed, hailed, and supported if your cause is just and your motives are righteous.
Just about everyone who showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday believed that about why they were there. The only difference between the horned man standing in the Senate chair or the smiling man hauling the speaker’s podium out the door and the fellow who attempted to tear down Andrew Jackson’s statue or the criminal who set fire to St. John’s Church is a matter of jersey color.
The nation is sick. It’s deeply divided, and its problems are only getting worse. But rooting out political opponents as those who need to be “cleansed” will only foment future violence, and it won’t go away with Trump.
