America in a Time of Campaign Violence

Richard Ojeda, a candidate for state Senate from Logan County, West Virginia, was brutally attacked at a campaign barbecue on Sunday.Photograph courtesy Kelly Ojeda

What was it about the news this week from Logan County, West Virginia, that was so disturbing? You may have seen the story, or at least the selfie that Richard Ojeda took in his hospital bed. Ojeda is a Democrat running for a state Senate seat. He was attacked at a campaign barbecue on Sunday, and in the photo, which he posted on his Facebook page, he looks awful—eight facial fractures, cuts, bruises, swelling. And yet he was defiant, even funny, in the Facebook messages he wrote. He was brushing his teeth with a sponge, he reported; he planned to get up and go to the polls on Tuesday—primary day—somehow, and he urged his neighbors to make sure to vote. His expression in the gruesome headshot had a hint of survivor’s satisfaction. A friend wrote, on his campaign page, “Though this attack seems to be politically motivated, Richard is as tough as woodpecker lips, as he often says, and he will pull through this.”

Ojeda also believed that the beating was political. His alleged assailant was an “idiot” whom Ojeda had known since childhood—a man, identified by police as Jonathan Stuart Porter, forty-one, with family ties to a local political machine that Ojeda has been challenging. Porter showed up at the barbecue and asked Ojeda for a bumper sticker. Ojeda remembered putting a sticker on the back bumper of Porter’s truck. Then Porter asked for another one for the front. Ojeda remembered crouching to apply the second sticker. Porter, striking silently from behind, kicked him unconscious, according to witnesses, some of whom said that Porter then fetched from his truck a set of brass knuckles. (Others thought it was a hammer.) He went to work on Ojeda’s head, and then apparently decided to run him over with his truck. Ojeda’s friends blocked that effort with all-terrain vehicles, which Porter smashed into. He fled into the mountains, where he remained for six hours before turning himself in to police. “All I know is, I woke up with my head on a tree stump covered in blood,” Ojeda told the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

A few hours before he was attacked, Ojeda told the Times, he had published, also on Facebook, photographs of documents that he had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showing that his opponent, a state senator named Art Kirkendoll, had been quietly collecting, for years, a “consulting fee” of twenty-five hundred dollars a month from Logan County. Ojeda asked voters to keep those payments in mind. Porter’s connection to Kirkendoll, as reported, seemed circuitous, but there were clearly plenty of other possible sources of political animosity. Porter’s uncle, Alvis Porter, a former Logan County circuit clerk, was recently convicted of participating in a wide-ranging kickback scheme for mining contracts—Logan County is coal country. Alvis Porter’s wife has contributed to Kirkendoll’s reëlection campaign, and Ojeda has spoken extensively against local corruption. Meanwhile, Jonathan Porter’s brother, Harold, is running for Logan County assessor. All of these candidates and officials, it should be pointed out, are Democrats. Ojeda is adamant that Harold Porter, the brother, could have had nothing to do with the attempt on his life. Others, Ojeda said, put “the knucklehead” up to it.

Ojeda is an Army combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I have dealt with the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” he wrote, on the morning after the attack. “I am not scared of those of you who think you can intimidate me.” It did seem, from all reports, that his enemies had chosen the wrong man to try to beat into submission, and on Tuesday, though he was not able to leave his hospital bed after all, the voters, perhaps rewarding Ojeda for his staying power, gave him the state Senate nomination. Of thirteen incumbents facing primary challenges in West Virginia this week, Kirkendoll was the only one who lost. Ojeda happily announced that he is looking forward to a civil debate of the issues with his Republican opponent in the fall.

What was unnerving about this bizarre story, then, wasn’t the outcome, which seemed to be an assertion of decency, or even the brutality of the attack, which could have been worse. It was the straight mix of violence and politics in an election year that feels like nothing in recent memory. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, has encouraged violence against demonstrators at his increasingly ominous rallies. He has offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who are charged with crimes. He’s suggested that he’d actually like to do some of the punching himself. Trump has pledged, if elected, to commit war crimes against the families of terrorists, and to force American troops to follow unlawful orders. This has long ceased to be theatre; it has turned into something else. While the outcome of the primaries was still in doubt, Republican Convention delegates from Colorado and Indiana reported receiving death threats when it was thought that they might support Senator Ted Cruz in Cleveland in July.

“I hate some of these people,” Trump said, at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in December. “But I would never kill them.” He was talking about reporters. This was, ostensibly, an attempt to draw a line, an attempt which he immediately undercut with a broad show of mimed indecision, a waggling hand that seemed to convey that maybe, on second thought, he should kill them. How do his supporters understand these mixed signals, this mugging on the subject of murder? Not clearly, in all cases. Indeed, the message is not meant to be clear. It is pitched to the violent fantasies of his audience, and its purpose is to excite, to transgress, to draw tighter the bonds of shared hatred. Reporters are far from the only hate-objects—and we are obviously not the most important despised group—helping drive the Trump campaign forward. But the job of covering Trump is getting darker, as the journalist Julia Ioffe discovered recently, after writing a profile of Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, for GQ.

Ioffe interviewed Melania Trump, a Slovenian immigrant, and found, in Slovenia, a family story that did not please her subject, including a half-brother whom Melania at first denied knowledge of. Melania attacked Ioffe and the piece as “dishonest” and full of mistakes without disputing a single fact, and Donald Trump attacked Ioffe and the piece without, he said, reading it at all. He had heard from his wife that the article was no good. That was enough for his followers. Ioffe was bombarded with death threats and hate mail, much of it anti-Semitic. Photoshopped images of Ioffe wearing a yellow star emblazoned “Jude” or dressed in a striped concentration camp uniform “at Camp Trump” landed in her inbox. Phone calls about coffins ordered or homicide cleanup services. Recordings of Hitler speeches. A gory caricature of a “Jew” being shot in the back of the head, with subject line, “They know about you!” Ioffe’s family fled anti-Semitism in Russia, as it happens, when she was a child. This is the response, remember, to a relatively gentle article. What will happen if Trump achieves power and is confronted, as he should be now, with serious investigative work? Ioffe filed a police report on April 29th.* The candidate, offered a chance by CNN to ask his supporters to stop the attacks, declined. “I don’t have a message for my fans,” he said. “I’d like to see my family treated fairly and nicely.”

*This sentence was updated with the date the police report was filed.