In the weeks since a 24-year-old Long Island man named Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely in a New York City subway car, the response from the Republican Partyās right wing has been as consistent as it is chilling. These politicians and commentators seem to believe that Neelyāa homeless former Michael Jackson impersonator who was reportedly berating passengersādeserved to die. Or put another way: Pennyās fear of his fellow passenger simply mattered more than Neelyās own right to live.
As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote last week, Republican presidential candidates have not just praised Penny, but raised money to help the former Marine fight his charge of manslaughter. Penny was a āGood Samaritan,ā said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. āLetās show this Marineā¦Americaās got his back.ā
Another GOP candidate, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, donated $10,000 to Pennyās defense fund. It was time, he said, to ārestore the rule of law in America.ā
There is one notable exception in all of this, though: Donald Trump. The former president has, by his standards, been conspicuously quiet on the subway homicide. This is a man who once took out a full-page newspaper ad demanding New York state bring back the death penalty so it could kill the teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. (They turned out to have been wrongfully accused.) As president, and ever since, he demonized the homeless in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, and talked about using the federal government to clear those residents off the streets. Trump was, and still is, at the vanguard of a broader conservative war on cities, and he has allied himself with peopleāsuch as Kyle Rittenhouse and the McCloskeys of St. Louisāwho embody the right-wing yearning for vigilantes to use violence, or the threat of violence, against liberal lawlessness. Or simply against liberals exercising constitutional rights in settings that conservatives don’t like.
If Trump has been conspicuously quiet on all of this, itās not because heās lost a step, and itās definitely not because of his compassion for Jordan Neelyāitās more that he doesnāt need to say anything. A campaign like this is how he wins. Every expression of extrajudicial bloodlust from a party that quite recently nominated Willard āMittā Romney, every Bane-like pronouncement from a tennis-playing shitposter, is an affirmation of who the party belongs to. Right now, all of his rivals are tripping over themselves to reinforce the supremacy of Trumpās politics, and to tear down the very prosecutor, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who just indicted Trumpāthe man they have to defeat. If thereās one thing Americaās most notorious grifter understands, itās the value of a free ride. Why invest your own capital, when you can have everyone else do it for you?