Donald Trump has recast Ashli Babbitt as a patriot-martyr and has transformed her death into one of the many tenuously connected grievances that inflame his base and keep him relevant. zakcheneyrice writes
Protester with an Ashli Babbitt poster. Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images The thing about martyrdom is that it works whether a cause is righteous or not, which makes it especially attractive to grieving parents. Losing a child can feel cosmically unjust. Losing a child who’s also a martyr can give their death meaning, at least, by applying a sheen of heroism to something that’s otherwise just ugly.
Witthoeft can’t have expected this response. Before January 6, her daughter was a frustrated U.S. Air Force veteran and QAnon conspiracist in her mid-30s who owned a struggling pool supply company outside of San Diego, California. Babbitt had recently been sued by her short-term business lender and was the target of a court protection order from her husband’s ex-girlfriend, whom she rear-ended three times with her car after a verbal altercation in 2016.
Babbitt’s death has become a cause célèbre on the right, in part because her death was among the worst and most sensational outcomes of that day — she was one of five people killed and it was caught on camera, her mouth gushing blood as she fell into the crowd. But the furor has been turbocharged by Trump, who has recast her as a patriot-martyr and has transformed her death into one of the many tenuously connected grievances that inflame his base and keep him relevant.
In a conversation with Dinesh D’Souza on his podcast in August, Witthoeft described her daily phone calls to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill and to Republican ones in the San Diego area, none of which has yielded the answers she’s looking for.
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