Hey, Sacramento Trump supporters: That riot on Capitol Hill was your fault, too
As riotous traitors stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, attempting to invalidate the results of a democratic election, I thought about Donald Trump supporters in my community who have stuck with a destructive president despite his words and actions that led us to this infamous moment in American history.
Trump may have set the stage for chaos by calling on his vice president to invalidate millions of American voters early Wednesday. But Trump never would have been in that position – he never would have gotten elected despite being clearly unstable and unfit – without people like the ones in Sacramento who have used their platforms and positions to shill for him.
They have tried to normalize his illiberal actions or they have participated in casting doubt on Trump’s electoral loss.
These last four years, Trump has merely been a symptom of a disease afflicting our politics. The real sickness, the real story, has always infected the people who bought the racist authoritarianism he was selling until this fever nightmare resulted in mobs storming Congress.
Don’t pretend to be surprised by what we saw. Don’t say this isn’t us. It is us, it has been us. The people who made this possible have been right in plain sight.
In my community, we begin with a spreader of misinformation, a guy I don’t know and who wouldn’t talk to me when I asked him a simple question: Why are you using your Twitter feed to promote the worst kind of debunked conspiracy theories about Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden?
If this guy were just some Joe Schmo, I would have ignored him. But he is Jim Eldridge, chief operating officer for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento.
In mid-November, a friend reached out to me privately and asked if I knew Eldridge or had noticed his Twitter feed. I didn’t and I hadn’t, but when I looked, I was floored. Beneath a smiling, amiable photo of this man in Sacramento Kings gear with a child I presume to be his, was a virtual toilet bowl of intolerance and conspiracy theories.
There was Eldridge’s re-tweet of Nov. 14 re-tweet by PollWatch, whose profile reads: “Political analysis. Election Information. Reagan-Trump Republican. Resisting Leftism.”
The tweet read: “The Leftist violent thugs are arms of Biden and the Media.”
There is no ambiguity in that, is there?
But it got better. On Nov. 11, Eldridge re-tweeted Rich “The People’s Pundit” Baris. His tweet read: “Every interview I do, someone asks about that poll, among others. We polled Wisconsin roughly during the same duration, in the field right along with them. We found a statistical tie.”
OK, well, the state of Wisconsin certified that Biden beat Trump by more than 20,000 votes.
Yet just eight days after Biden beat Trump, the COO for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento was re-tweeting false information that cast doubt on Biden’s win and our entire elections system.
This was crazy but as I looked into this further I found that beginning on Oct. 14 and for a solid month until I reached out him, Eldridge was a conspiracy theory, re-tweeting machine. What’s even more strange is that no one at Kaiser seemed to know about this until I brought it to their attention. I mean, Eldridge was putting this garbage on his public timeline that identified him as their COO.
He sat on significant boards, such as the local Salvation Army. He is educated and works in an important, white collar job in the capital of California. Yet here he was, using his Twitter feed to cast doubt on a Presidential election, presumably because his favored candidate didn’t win.
Before the end of March, when COVID-19 shut down Sacramento and the rest of the nation, Eldridge’s twitter feed had been what one would expect from his position: Food drives, health fairs, expressions of appreciation for community folks. The most edgy thing Eldridge tweeted were the occasionally snarky comments about the sad state of the Kings.
But even then, Eldridge’s Kings tweets were far more reasonable than my bitter Kings fan rants on Twitter.
Then from March 27 to Oct. 13, there were no tweets from Eldridge. Nothing. Then on Oct. 14, it was as if his feed became radicalized.
Eldridge began re-tweeting the now discredited New York Post story that falsely claimed that Joe Biden used his influence in the Ukraine to help the business deals of his son, Hunter. Then Eldridge followed with a series of re-tweets alleging that the mainstream media was censoring the debunked Post story – even though the story was widely covered and disseminated. I counted 10 Eldridge retweets between Oct. 14 and 19.
Then after the Nov. 3 election, Eldridge began re-tweeting people casting doubt on Biden’s win. On Nov .14, he re-tweeted several tweets by Andy Ngo showing horrific violence between demonstrators in Washington, D.C. He was re-tweeting this smut all day long on Nov. 14.
Of course, when I approached Eldridge he hid behind Kaiser spokespeople. Of course, the same day I approached, all the offending tweets were deleted. And now, the entire Twitter feed is gone.
“We strongly believe in freedom of speech, and we do not monitor our employees’ social media accounts,” Sandy Sharon, vice president and area manager of Kaiser Permanente, said in a written statement.
“We do ask that employees make clear, however, that any views they express on social media are their own, and not those of Kaiser Permanente,” she wrote. “When we became aware of Mr. Eldridge’s Twitter posts, we advised him to make clear that the views expressed are his own and that he was not representing Kaiser Permanente. We take this matter seriously and Mr. Eldridge has since rectified his social media account.”
Eldridge said in a written statement: “Most of my Twitter activity has involved retweeting posts from others and I am very sorry to have retweeted the views and opinions of others that many would understandably consider inflammatory and divisive. This has taught me a valuable lesson that retweeting someone else’s posts can often associate you with the entirety of their views, even if you don’t personally share or endorse them. I do not share all of the views of those I retweeted, and I am deeply regretful and disappointed in myself that I gave that impression. I also failed to clarify that my tweets did not reflect the views of Kaiser Permanente, as our social media policy specifically instructs employees to do. I’ve since deleted my account as I re-evaluate the best use – and pitfalls – of social media.”
Political cancer
After I received these statements on Nov. 17, do you know what I did? I filed them away and didn’t write a thing about this in November or December. To me, the case was closed and I was going to let it go even though what Eldridge did and his facile response bugged me all during the Christmas break.
But I rationalized it as I think many people had previously done – we rolled our eyes at the hardcore Trump supporters. We can’t believe they support a president who wants to invalidate an election.
But then Wednesday happened. Then rioters stormed the Capitol of the United States of America in an effort to invalidate a democratic election.
And I realized, I can’t let this go. We can’t let this go because this is beyond partisanship. This is about an attempted coup. There is no other way to describe what Trump and his supporters, including locally elected members of Congress, have been trying to do since Biden beat Trump at the polls.
A coup is not a one-day event. It doesn’t happen over night. It forms like cancer cells in a body, one violation of Democratic norms at a time, spreading over years.
In this case, this coup has formed ever since that June day in 2015 when Trump declared his candidacy by equating Mexicans to rapists. In 2017, Trump said that Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were no better or worse than people protesting those hate groups.
Trump has spawned hate and division from the Oval Office since. He refused to condemn racists while marginalizing or attacking Blacks, Latinos, gay people, Trans people, Muslims, women, refugees, Pope Francis, Gold Star families, the late John McCain, etc., etc.
He was elected, despite running a hateful campaign and being a hateful person. He is a hateful leader incapable of humanity.
So when Eldridge said that he doesn’t agree with everything he re-tweeted, the question I couldn’t ask him was: OK, which lies supporting Trump did you agree with?
Do you agree with invalidating elections? Because he was a re-tweeting fool on that one for a while. You’re telling me you were re-tweeting easily debunked election corruption theories because you don’t believe them? I ran into this same attitude everywhere among Trumpers, including the day after the election when I debated Robla School District Board President Craig DeLuz, a local Black conservative, who tried to thread quite the needle.
He supported Trump, but when I pointed out Trump is declaring himself the winner even though he clearly lost, DeLuz said oh, well, I don’t necessarily agree with everything Trump says.
For four years, I let those comments slide, but those cowardly justifications helped open the door for rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. Instead of denouncing clear violations of our alleged Democratic ideals, people like Eldridge and DeLuz took the side against democracy. They were part of the cancer.
Super spreaders of malice
My dear friend Doug Ose, the former local congressman, came out early for Trump despite his open racism and destruction of democratic norms. I’ve been wrestling with this for four years. I like the guy, but his support of Trump added to the chorus that ultimately encouraged misguided people to crash through the windows of the U.S. Congress.
On Wednesday, Ose tweeted this:”I would not be surprised to see antifa storm the US Capitol. I am stunned to see patriots do so. This is unacceptable. Clear the building now.”
What “patriots” are you talking about, brother? Did Ose tweet to denounce Trump for trying to pressure his vice president to invalidate the election? No. Did he tweet to call on Trump to denounce the violence? No.
Did Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones take to Facebook to decry the violence at the U.S. Capitol or to call on Trump to act like a president? No. But when he had the chance in 2018, Jones went to the White House and pandered to Trump on immigration.
Jones’ buddy Kevin Mickelson, the head of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Union, took to his Facebook page recently with pictures of himself in a Donald Trump face mask.
Yeah, the leader of the largest law enforcement union in the region left no doubt about how he feels. And what did Mickelson spend his time doing on Wednesday? His association put out a press release calling for the resignation of Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna. Why? Because Serna dared criticize Trump supporters harshly on his Facebook page.
What happened to these people?
All of them – Eldridge, DeLuz, Ose, Jones, Mickelson and many others – shared culpability for what we saw at our nation’s capital on Wednesday.
Once those thugs had breached the door, smashed the windows and entered what used to be viewed as sacred place of democracy, the cost of supporting Trump was there for all to see.
It may have happened in Washington, but a virtual attack on American democracy was created by Trump and spread across the country, by otherwise good people who – for their own reasons – went along with a president who didn’t believe in democracy.
Trump will go down in the history book as the worst president in our nation’s history, with his final legacy a very visible assault on our democracy. But his damage was spread by people who supported him, ultimately turning up the volume on his call to undemocratic action, setting off an attempt to destroy what they claim to love.
This story was originally published January 7, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
