On Monday, an Ohio Republican lawmaker introducing GOP vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance suggested that, should Vance and presidential nominee Donald Trump fail to win the 2024 election, their supporters should engage in a “civil war to save the country.”
State Sen. George Lang later apologized for his comments at the rally when it became apparent that he was going viral online for endorsing political violence in order to instill candidates of his own preference against the will of American voters.
Vance did not condemn Lang’s comments during the rally or acknowledge them in any statements since.
Lang represents Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where the rally was taking place, as well as portions of Butler County.
“Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically,” Lang said in his introduction of Vance. “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country and it will be saved.”
Lang went on to talk of a potential internal conflict within the U.S.
“If we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Schmidty [state Rep. Jean Schmidt] and the bikers for Trump on our side,” Lang said, referencing groups who were attending the rally.
Lang later apologized for his remarks on social media, claiming he had advocated for military action in the event that Trump doesn’t win the election because he was caught up in the moment.
“I regret the divisive remarks I made in the excitement of the moment on stage. Especially in light of the assassination attempt of President Trump last week, we should all be mindful of what is said at political events, myself included,” Lang said on X.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign compared Lang’s remarks to Trump’s statement to his followers last year that he was their “retribution” against Democrats in office.
“Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are running a campaign openly sowing hatred and promising revenge against their political opponents,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “That’s why a Republican official was empowered to predict a civil war while introducing these candidates.
Recent polling demonstrates that a small but worrying number of Americans believe violence may be necessary to achieve desired political ends.
According to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from March, 20 percent of U.S. adults agree with the statement that Americans “have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.” Likely influenced by Trump’s and his surrogates’ vitriol toward Democrats, a greater proportion of Republicans believe violence is justified, with nearly 3 in 10 (28 percent) saying so. (Only 12 percent of Democratic respondents responded similarly.)
Lang’s backtracking of his incendiary rhetoric is yet another example of a common strategy among Republican lawmakers: inciting their supporters and then acting surprised when they are accused of having inspired the violence that takes place later on.
Trump himself has often employed this strategy. According to an analysis from ABC News during the 2020 presidential election, there are dozens of examples of people engaging in violent attacks against others and later saying they were motivated by something Trump said.
Some specific examples stand out. In 2018, Trump’s frequent attacks on the media, which he has repeatedly labeled the “enemy” of Americans, resulted in a supporter of his sending a pipe bomb to a news organization’s headquarters, with similar devices sent to the homes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and others Trump had disparaged online.
During his 2020 debate with now-President Joe Biden, Trump was asked if he’d disavow white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys. Instead, he seemingly gave the group a command to wait for his orders: “Stand back and stand by,” Trump said.
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the group, responded that night by tweeting: “standing by, sir.”
Motivated by Trump’s statement, many Proud Boys showed up on January 6, 2021, as a coordinated segment in the violent breach on the U.S. Capitol building during the certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Beyond the Proud Boys, hundreds of January 6 defendants who have been charged by the Justice Department said, as part of their defense arguments or plea deals, that Trump had “called” on them to take part in the attack.
Trump employs this strategy in other ways, too — including by backtracking on policy ideas he once promoted after they are met with backlash. The GOP nominee, for example, has vastly downplayed his support for a national abortion ban he seemingly endorsed earlier this year, instead publicly stating that he now backs a “states’ rights” approach to the issue (a policy that would still result in dangerous abortion bans in many parts of the country).
Trump has also denied any connection to Project 2025, a far right platform authored by the Heritage Foundation that aims to enforce a wide array of Christian nationalist policies, despite key pieces of the platform being based on Trump’s own ideas for how the GOP should govern should he win the election this year. Indeed, despite claiming now to “know nothing about” the set of policy goals, video from two years ago shows Trump lauding both the organization and the then-unnamed “project” that Heritage was starting to formulate.
In that video from 2022, which features Trump speaking at a Heritage-hosted event, Trump says that the organization is “a great group,” adding that the project they were authoring would create “detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
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