An elected GOP politician from Ohio is warning that if Donald Trump doesn’t win the 2024 election it will mean “Civil War.”
State Sen. George Lang was one of the warm-up speakers Monday at a Trump campaign rally Monday, where vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance spoke solo for the 2024 GOP ticket for the first time. The rally was held in the suburb of Middletown, Ohio, where Vance grew up — just days after a Republican National Convention at which Trump had tried to stage a show of national unity.
Lang — in sharp contrast — used his time at the TRUMP branded podium to warn of violence that could tear America apart. Lang, who represents nearby Hamilton, Ohio, took the stage shouting Trump’s post-shooting battlecry, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” And Lang insisted that America is in a “fight for the soul of our nation” and for “our kids and our grandkids.”
He then uncorked his views on looming partisan violence. “I believe wholeheartedly that Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country, politically,” Lang said. “I’m afraid that if we lose this one, it’s gonna take a civil war to save this country.”
Lang quickly emphasized that a militarized MAGA movement would win such a war.
“It will be saved,” he said.
Lang didn’t stop there, elaborating that “if we come down to a civil war I’m glad we have people like … the Bikers for Trump on our side,” pointing to a group of MAGA motorcycle enthusiasts in the audience. Lang then inveighed against liberals he claimed are “chipping away” at our rights, insisting of the American republic, that 2024 is the “last stand to save it!”
The bombastic message suggests MAGA Republicans are returning to form after the RNC convention in Milwaukee, which attempted to portray Trump — in the aftermath of the attempt against his life — as a changed man and a chastened figure who would lead the country to a less divisive, unified place. “I am running to be president for all of America,” Trump said during his acceptance of the GOP nomination, “not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”
However that mask of unity was loosely applied — and the familiar divisive impulses and bellicose language of the MAGA movement were on display at side events throughout the week. At a Moms for Liberty forum, for example, former Trump presidential rival Vivek Ramaswamy compared the MAGA movement to America’s founding revolutionaries, and declared that the 2024 election would be “our generation’s 1776.”
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