He’ll issue a one-sentence statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” That he knows is beside the point. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram, where she dies on permanent repeat for a man who won’t, in fact, say her name for half a year, until the day it proves useful, when the Trump Organization is indicted for tax fraud. She believed Trump was “one of gods greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they had a girlfriend she had four younger brothers and parents who loved her, and in the end, she left them all. “She was all in,” says Aaron, who did not share her devotion. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. (Her last words, as she bleeds on the Capitol floor, according to a witness: “It’s cool.”) She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt, and there was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. “She just did boy things,” her brother will say. As a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven.
But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing. “#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their appropriation of a campaign created for Black women. As if rather than a bullet there’s an unsettling thought. Her hands fly up, open, empty, raised to her temples. A man wearing a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag tied like a bib beneath his MAGA hat hands Goose a black helmet with which to hit the glass. A young man wearing a black T-shirt and $325 Canada Goose aviator fur hat, shouts “Heyyy!” He stretches out his arms, pulsing veins-he has already punched the glass, hard-and opens his hands. One screams at the cops, “You lied!” The cops said there was nobody on the other side. She shouts: “Just open the door!” It’s barricaded. (“Joking,” her defenders will claim.) There’s a knife in her pocket. We don’t yet know to look for her, but she’s there on the screen, the only woman, up front (“a firecracker,” her friends will say), screaming at cops. A video gives us a crowd throbbing against two wooden windowed doors, one reinforced glass pane spiderwebbing, three Capitol Police officers, standing between the glass and members of Congress on the other side. We watched almost in real time, or soon enough after, her death looped and memed before the fight was over. We watched her die before we knew her name. “Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it…” -Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, recalling 1860 1.
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