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At a recent rally in Erie, former President Donald Trump gave U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-16th District) his flowers. Unfortunately, the flowers were soaked in the blood and gore of Trump’s dystopian horror movie fixation of the moment: “The Purge.”
While musing on what he insists is an epidemic of migrant-fueled property and retail crime in America today, Trump began spewing an anarchic fantasy about “one really violent day” facilitated by police officers calculated to trigger anyone with even the most modest commitment to civil liberties.
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough,” Trump said showing his disdain for restraints on law enforcement dictated by minimum standards of due process, “the word will get out and it [retail crime] will end immediately.”
Trump then gave a shout out to Rep. Kelly, who was in the crowd, implicating him in future crimes against constitutional order. “Mike Kelly, put him in,” Trump said to the cheers of the crowd.
“Congressman Kelly,” Trump continued, “put him in charge for one day…” With that, the applause echoed through the crowded venue like the sound of batons and brass knuckles on a suspect’s exposed head. It was the kind of dark political sentiment and raw authoritarianism devotees of late stage MAGA have come to enjoy and expect.
Judging by what he dropped on social media shortly after the rally ended, being acknowledged so warmly by the GOP’s most powerful felon thrilled Kelly who has always exuded a mid-level henchman’s vibe, to no end. And with Trump returning to Butler this weekend, to the very same venue where he survived an assassination attempt in July, Kelly is sure to be on hand to pay the expected fealty.
If Trump wins, Kelly probably believes he will be selected to join Trump’s government — possibly in a Cabinet-level position.
It’s a reasonable supposition if you’re Kelly, a wily car dealership owner who won his first race for a U.S. House seat in 2010 during the Tea Party uprising.
Kelly was a persistent election denier in 2020 when it counted most for the former president. When Joe Biden won Pennsylvania on the strength of mail-in ballots four years ago, Kelly filed a lawsuit to invalidate more than 2.5 million ballots belonging to his fellow Pennsylvanians so Trump could win.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court lost no time in laughing it off the docket and dismissing it “with prejudice.”
Since it is difficult to shame Kelly for long, he also signed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of “Texas v. Pennsylvania” with 126 other Republican House members who argued that Biden stole the 2020 election somehow and that Trump should be declared the actual winner.
Even the Roberts court with its overwhelming contempt for precedent and justice couldn’t take the clown car logic of the Republicans seriously enough to listen to even a minute of oral arguments. SCOTUS declined to take the case.
In a post-rally video last Sunday, Kelly thanked Trump for honoring Erie with his brutish, traveling roadshow. Because he was still caught up in the glow of Trump’s flattery, he was in no mood to disavow his nomination as the future boss of a criminal conspiracy to deprive ordinary citizens of their constitutional rights during encounters with police.
No, it was better to bask in the warmth of the infernal flames of future police beat downs than to sheepishly reject it as both unconstitutional and unwise. Fortune favors the felonious, as they say.
This kind of moral cowardice is typical of Kelly who, as fate would have it, bears a vague resemblance to actor Anthony Hopkins who starred as the refined serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs,” an Oscar-winning film shot in Fayette County and other parts of Pittsburgh more than three decades ago.
Before Trump became fascinated with the possibility of directing the ultra-violence of “The Purge” cinematic universe from the dungeon he plans to build under the Oval Office, he often referenced Hannibal Lecter at his rallies in ways too strange to know whether he approved of Hollywood’s favorite cannibal or not.
“Hannibal Lecter would love to have you for dinner,” he prattled to mystified audiences last summer. It was weird, weird stuff, even to most of his devoted followers.
After being brutally mocked for it by Vice President Kamala Harris during their debate last month, Trump retired that moldy routine and began pilfering parts of his future domestic agenda from a more contemporary dystopian movie franchise.
Some of Trump’s defenders say it’s reasonable for the former president to have an exaggerated sense of crime and danger in America having dodged two assassination attempts in a relatively short period.
One theory is that Trump has been more rattled by the proximity of his own death than most of us realize. Because he doesn’t have much of an inner life to fall back on that isn’t a black hole of nothingness, he wants all Americans to experience the same terror that he’s going through in real time.
To be totally empathetic to Trump in his twilight years will most likely require the loss of our civil liberties if we’re stupid enough to elect him and bow to the Trumpian “will to power.” The gory melodrama of “The Purge” fits his despair and his tendency to project his misery upon others perfectly.
We should also understand that there will never be a shortage of stooges willing to carry out Trump’s agenda given the chance. Kelly is one of them.
When one of Kelly’s constituents tried to kill the former president during a rally in Butler in July, the congressman immediately blamed “the left” even though the motive of the would-be assassin remains unknown. Like his leader, the former president, Kelly isn’t shy about exploiting a tragedy for political gain.
Ironically, Kelly now chairs a bipartisan House task force investigating that assassination attempt that took place in his hometown.
Though such a task force is necessary, it is difficult to have confidence in the acumen of a chairman who has already proven himself to be short-sighted about what constitutes conspiracy in high places. Kelly is a conspiracy theorist to his core, so this may be a case of Satan trying to cast out Satan.
With the prime suspect dead and practically no social media presence to excavate for clues, the assassination task force may be doomed to issue a report that says nothing substantive beyond indicting the Secret Service for its sloppiness.
Still, it is a convenient perch for Kelly to promote unproven conspiracies if his impulse is to please Trump at all costs, especially if the payoff is a seat at the bloody dinner table with a guy who is already attempting to devour our civil liberties — America’s heart, soul and liver — with a side of “fava beans and a nice chianti.”