One of the most symbolic acts of Donald Trump’s presidency was his failure to attend the funeral of the former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June. The suspect – believed to be a Trump supporter and conservative evangelical Christian – shot the couple dead in their home allegedly after seriously wounding a state senator and his wife. He had a list of dozens of potential targets; they were all Democrats.
Trump responded by belittling the grieving state governor. Instead of attending the funeral, he went golfing with Republican leaders.
His contempt for a murdered elected official was more eloquent than any attempted coup. As “leader of the free world”, he presents the nightmare scenario for any democracy. The speed at which tens of millions of “ordinary” Americans have normalised his barbarism is the lesson.
How this country responds to the escalating threats against Simon Harris will define where decent people draw the line at “normal”. Security and crime editor Conor Lally’s report last weekend on the day-to-day intimidation of Irish politicians was a red alert.
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A man who appeared “normal and reasonable” threatened to shoot a Minister in the head when the latter opened his car window in traffic. A Minister has had to give gardaí permission to monitor his phone in an effort to trace an “army” of threatening and abusive callers ringing him through the night.
Many politicians are followed by up-close phone cameras held by people screaming c**t, bollocks, scum, traitor. Many feel unsafe shopping in their local supermarkets, on the street, on the beach with children. Women politicians have been assaulted out canvassing and speak of threats of rape and acid attacks. We know only a fraction of it because many will not talk out loud about it.
Long before last week’s arrest of a woman for allegedly threatening to kidnap Harris’s small children, Harris – who was not among Lally’s sources – had suffered groups of masked and unmasked “protesters” showing up outside his home as well as bomb threats within it, culminating on Sunday in an orchestrated series of calls to Garda stations claiming a bomb had been planted in his home. His visit to Mayo last year made headlines when he was jostled and pushed and had a phone camera wielded inches from his face before he – the elected leader of this State – was chased out of town.
The humiliating episode had one useful outcome: video evidence of the limitless forbearance many people demand as a right from politicians.
Following a further “vile and sinister” threat of a sexual nature made to a close family member with no public social media profile last Friday, Harris spoke of the threat to democracy when he said he perceived “a clear and sinister pattern and a very apparent motivation ... to intimidate me out of public office”.
This is a serious charge.
Running simultaneously is a very public, fiercely vociferous campaign to force Harris to resign, led by the parents of nine-year-old Harvey Morrison Sherratt, who received long-delayed surgery for scoliosis and spina bifida last November but died following a sudden deterioration in July. The campaign’s justification is that as minister for health eight years ago, Harris rashly pledged to leave no scoliosis patient waiting longer than four months for surgery.
In an X post on Sunday, Harvey’s mother Gillian Sherratt firmly condemned the threats as “disgusting”, saying anyone who was using Harvey’s name to do so was “doing him a massive disservice”. Their issues with Harris, she said, had always been political and not personal. But as any protest organiser knows, it’s difficult to control a campaign juggernaut in an age of scattergun fury.
Surveys conducted among elected officials in both the UK and US are finding increasingly that violence is not related to a single cause, but to a fragmented electorate who distrust their representatives, while finding it easier than ever to track them down. In Britain, where two MPs have been brutally murdered in their constituencies since 2016, MPs and candidates are facing “industrial” levels of intimidation and harassment, according to the British minister for democracy, Rushanara Ali.
A few days after a Dublin rally led by the Morrison Sherratts, I questioned here whether Harris’s choice to post a fun selfie at the Oasis gig was a sensible one, given some people’s allergy to any politicians enjoying themselves – but, particularly in Harris’s case, when a deafening campaign for his resignation was building.
He answered the question indirectly at the weekend: “I know we are meant to be silent. I know for some it seems like a new reality that those in public life must accept. But I cannot. It is me today but it will be someone else tomorrow ... Someone has to call a halt.”
[ 'If there were threats to bomb your house, I’m not sure you’d be in work today.'Opens in new window ]
Much of the response on social media was to accuse him of lying about the threats or of using his children as political cover.
It is difficult to fathom how any politician finds the resilience and continuing family support to withstand the constant drumbeat of cynicism, intimidation and threat. The predictable, slam-dunk answer to politicians’ complaints about public abuse is that they themselves have lied and shown contempt for the people. But the chilling corollary to that is open season on any politician. If “they’re all the same”, as is constantly implied, retribution will come to all, even the purists.
Voters know where the Trump-style politics of contempt leads. They can see that when civic and political figures engage in personalised abuse and performative “the country is a sh*thole” nihilism there is a deadening effect on democracy. No one can be that surprised when some benighted souls decide to act on it.
