The Manhandling of Alex Padilla Was a Red-Line Moment for America

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In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner took to the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech denouncing slavery. Sumner was a fiery abolitionist; in his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate four years earlier, he had called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, which an Alabama senator disparaged thus: 'The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm.' Sumner continued to inveigh against slavery and its apologists throughout his first term. Clearly, he suffered from Pierce Derangement Syndrome (Franklin).
Among those Sumner attacked directly in his May 1856 speech was his Senate colleague Andrew Butler of South Carolina. His words were, to be sure, impolitic: '[Butler] has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.'
Two days later, in one of the most infamous incidents in American political history, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a first cousin once removed of Butler's, walked over to the Senate chamber, waited until no women were present in the gallery (Southern chivalry!), and attacked Sumner on the Senate floor with a metal-topped cane, beating him within an inch of his life.
Alex Padilla, the Democratic California senator, did not bleed Thursday. He wasn't even hurt. But the sight of a U.S. senator being manhandled by FBI agents was shocking enough. Lawrence O'Donnell said Thursday night that Padilla was the first senator in history to be so accosted by law enforcement officials. I don't know for sure that that's true, but (1) I suspect if there were another, we'd know about it, and (2) even if he's the second or third, that wouldn't make how he was treated any better.
The incident didn't last that long. But the real damage came after, when the lie machine reliably revved itself into action. It started with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whose press conference Padilla had interrupted. She went on Fox News within the hour to say he 'burst in' and was 'lunging' toward her and 'did not identify himself.'
All lies. As anyone can see from the video, he was a good 10 feet away from Noem. But even if he had lunged—and even if he were not a senator but a mere citizen, or really any human being who is not threatening violence—this is how Donald Trump's FBI treats such people? Escort them away—OK. But push them to the ground and cuff them, when they've left the room and are no longer in any way a plausible 'threat'?
And it was in that moment—the decision by the agents to take the matter to a totally unnecessary, completely gratuitous extreme—that we find lurking the essence of Trumpism.
The essence of Trumpism is just this: Dig in the heel of the boot; step on the enemy's neck; determine in any situation the action that would be appropriately small-d democratic, and then do the opposite—go intentionally overboard, do something that shocks and offends the democratic sensibility. And then lie about it and try to reverse reality—to convince America that it didn't see what it just saw. That truth is the opposite of what it seems.
A few Republican senators, and I mean a precious few, responded appropriately. Like, one: Alaska's Lisa Murkowski said, 'It's horrible. It is shocking at every level. It's not the America I know.' Susan Collins emitted the usual timorous excretion. Otherwise? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on Morning Joe Friday that he and colleagues Cory Booker and Brian Schatz waited on the Senate floor—who knows, perhaps not far from Sumner's Desk 29, occupied today by New Hampshire Democrat Jean Shaheen—for their GOP colleagues to appear and denounce what happened. Not only did they not do that, Murphy said: 'They basically said he deserved what he got simply because he was disrespectful to the president.'
But Trump was surely most pleased by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who put all the blame on Padilla and called on the Senate to censure him: 'I think that that behavior at a minimum rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we're going to do; that's not what we're going to act.' Note the 'at a minimum,' which leaves dangling the insane possibility that Padilla should … what? Just be expelled? Again, the essence of Trumpism is found in those three words.
This is what they do. All the time. Trump federalizes the National Guard and sends in the Marines; he crows that if he hadn't acted, Los Angeles would have been 'completely obliterated.' Think about the scale of that lie, referring to protests in a four- or five-block area in a city of 500 square miles. He told it over and over in various forms, as did Noem and others. The behavior has its precedents in the United States: Southerners accused Sumner of faking his injuries. They argued that the cane was not heavy enough to cause severe injury. Others, more direct about matters, piped up that Sumner deserved a caning every day.
And the right-wing media, like the Southern press in the 1850s, reliably echoed every word Trump, Noem, and the others said. Meanwhile the mainstream media failed dramatically this week by accepting the lazy frame that immigration is a 'winner' for Trump. Two polls came out—this one and this one—showing this emphatically not to be the case. The second poll, from Quinnipiac, was bleak for Trump across the board. Only 27 percent of the country supports the big ugly bill. That's not even all of MAGA America. People are beginning to understand that they indulged themselves last year in some fantasy projection of 'Donald Trump.' They're seeing the real article now, and they're remembering his viciousness, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his lawlessness.
And it's going to get worse. Trumpism proceeds by the successive breaking of taboos. Each time a new one is broken, the previous one is normalized, made to look not so bad by comparison. The cuffing of Padilla was a red-line moment. And yet: There's plenty of reason to worry that in four months, we'll look back on it as a moment of comparative innocence.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.