NBC Reporter Explains ‘Massive’ Scope of Threats Against Politicians After Ex-GOP Candidate Arrested For Shooting at Democrats’ Homes

NBC News’s Senior Capitol Hill Correspondent, Garrett Haake, joined Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show on Tuesday to discuss the arrest of a failed GOP candidate charged with shooting at the homes of New Mexico Democrats and explained the scope of threats facing political leaders in the U.S. today.

“Garrett, it’s not a whodunit. Donald Trump did it. Donald Trump did it. And Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, by letting him try it out after November, made all those people human targets for political violence. What’s the response today?” asked Wallace.

“Well, from the right, it’s there’s been basically none. I mean, look, I think we have to look at this from a slightly broader perspective. I mean, Trump is the kind of has an immediate triggering effect on this. But if you look at the right-wing ecosystem when it comes to political violence in general, there’s a much more challenging dynamic here at play,” Haake replied, adding:

This combination of, you know, apocalyptic rhetoric about stolen elections and the failure of democracy, the idea that it’s not just any one election that’s been, you know, triggered by fraud, but the very essence of democracy is being taken away from you, combined with this kind of Second Amendment absolutism and and fetishized fetishization of guns.

“I’m looking at the warrant here for the arrest of Solomon Peña. And in one of the pictures, one of his accomplices, and you won’t see this very well on TV is sitting at a table with seven or eight guns kind of arrayed in front of him,” Haake added, referring the former GOP candidate for New Mexico’s legislature arrested on Tuesday.

“The combination of that kind of political apocalyptic viewpoint and an attitude towards firearms that says we’re going to have them, we’re going to have a bunch. We’re going to carry them with us everywhere we go creates the environment where anybody you know, there are unstable people all across the political spectrum,” Haake said, adding:

But if you sort of subscribe, if you check those other two boxes, you create the environment in which this situation happens. And if you add someone like a Donald Trump to that, you do create a very dangerous and difficult situation. And to build on Frank’s point, you know, this is a case where Solomon Peña lost his election by 50 percentage points.

If this was a rigging, it was a very, very effective rigging. There’s no opportunity for law enforcement to say this is a case where we should watch out that someone might be an election denier. This wasn’t one that was close, that somebody might be worried about a ballot box being stuffed. I mean, this is not the kind of thing that would even be on that radar. Should local police departments have radar finely tuned enough to pick this up?

“I mean, it is a pervasive problem. There were 9,000 recorded threats against members of Congress in 2021, the last complete year we have the numbers. That’s more than 25 threats a day that are reported to the Capitol Police. Who knows how many more go beyond that? I mean, the scope of this problem is massive and there’s not a good handle on it from a law enforcement perspective or a political perspective right now,” Haake concluded.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC