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Notes -
The responses litigating exactly how many Republicans can fit on the head of a pin are missing the point.
“Coded incitement to violence” was a band-aid. Trump obviously didn’t explicitly call for violence, but there was a vocal contingent at Twitter who were sure they were enabling a turbulent-priest scenario.
As far as band-aids go...it was kind of, sort of, not the worst?
For an extreme case, you could imagine a leader who posts perfectly inoffensive general encouragement, but only exactly one week after members of his tribe commit an honor killing. He would be signaling that he is not ashamed, maybe even supportive. Might that not normalize the action? If this leader has consistently claimed he’ll go to bat for his team, such as with pardons, is he not shifting the cost-benefit?
We could tell this hypothetical leader apart by checking when he doesn’t speak up. If he’s only occasionally supportive after such a crime, and the timing is inconsistent, and sometimes there’s another’s good reason to give praise in the news, he’s got plausible deniability. More importantly, he is sending less information. His partisans can’t be quite so sure that honor killings are okay or that he’d bail them out. He doesn’t have to disavow, just not set up the classical conditioning.
But Trump does not shut up. You could have a mass shooting all over the news and he’d still take (figurative) shots at Pelosi. This is a downside for actually sending coded signals—while still giving enemies plenty of noise to sift for patterns. It’s the dog whistle argument all over again. Screech shrilly enough, and a dog could plausibly take notice.
So Twitter has a bunch of Democrat partisans who are predisposed to see incitement in Trump’s language. And Trump keeps giving them ammunition by running his same old strongman schtick regardless of what’s happening at the Capitol. The end result is that he gets banned not for a smoking gun, but for a reading of the tea leaves.
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