Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina won the Republican nomination in his state’s June 11 primary, all but ensuring that in November’s general election, he will hang onto the seat he has occupied for more than two decades.
Unless you live in his state or congressional district, there’s little reason to know Wilson, yet his name may trigger a certain memory. Nearly 15 years ago, his unprecedented public outburst at a president not only marked one of the defining moments of Barack Obama’s White House tenure; it helped birth this current odious strain of Republican politics.
In September 2009, Obama went to Capitol Hill and spoke at a joint session of Congress about what would become his landmark Affordable Care Act. As Obama recalled in his memoir, “A Promised Land,” when he reiterated that undocumented immigrants would not be eligible for coverage, Wilson “leaned forward in his seat, pointed in my direction, and shouted, his face flushed with fury, ‘You lie!’”
Sitting behind Obama, Joe Biden, then vice president, dropped his chin to his chest and shook his head. Mouth agape in shock, Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, glared at the heckler and looked like she was ready to take her earrings off. After a brief pause, Obama continued his speech.
“As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before in a joint session address — at least not in modern times,” Obama wrote. In a statement, Wilson apologized, but he did not personally contact Obama. He also refused to apologize on the House floor and claimed that “one apology is sufficient.” His House GOP colleagues agreed, but House Democrats rebuked Wilson with a “resolution of disapproval” that Republicans protested.
That should have been the end of it.
But Wilson became a GOP darling and raked in millions in donations nationwide. The optics were undeniable: A white congressman — representing the first state to secede from the Union and the state where Confederate traitors fired the first shots of the Civil War — was rewarded for publicly insulting this nation’s first Black president.
“Apparently, for a lot of Republican voters out there, [Wilson] was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the healthcare bill,” Obama wrote. “They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican officeholders: When it came to opposing my administration, the old rules no longer applied.”
Political opponents became enemies unworthy of basic respect. It was a turning point for Republicans and had repercussions that continue to jolt American politics. What should have been an ugly footnote became a harbinger of the chaos to come. There’s an unbroken line from Wilson’s verbal assault on Obama to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wearing a MAGA hat and constantly barking and snarling like an obedience school dropout during President Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this year.
That Wilson was neither marginalized nor voted out of office taught the GOP that aberrant behavior would be not only tolerated but embraced so long as it aligned with the party’s most divisive instincts and thirst for power.
Of course, no one has benefited more from this than Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. After he was found guilty on 34 felony counts relating to his so-called hush money trial, he used his new status as a felon as a fundraising tactic. According to Trump’s campaign, he raised nearly $53 million in the 24-hour period after he became the first former president convicted in a criminal trial.
His recent fundraising blast started with the line “Haul Out the Guillotine” and implied that it’s the “sick dream” of “every Trump-deranged lunatic” to see harm come to him. Even with warnings from federal law enforcement agencies about potential domestic terrorism spurred by the upcoming presidential election and world events, Trump’s evocation of violence, meant to rile up his base, was barely a blip in the news cycle.
Such inflammatory nonsense from Trump is commonplace, but normalizing it makes us all complicit.
To a great extent, that acceptance of the unacceptable began with Wilson calling Obama a liar to his face on national television — and greatly benefiting from it. That should have ended or at least severely crippled Wilson’s political career. Instead, his two-word outburst was like a short but sharp pain that portends something far more insidious to come.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.
