{"id":122532,"date":"2026-01-06T19:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T19:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/122532\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T19:51:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T19:51:10","slug":"how-a-san-diego-veteran-became-a-maga-martyr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/122532\/","title":{"rendered":"How a San Diego veteran became a MAGA martyr"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story<\/a> was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th<\/a>. Meet Jennifer and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump quickly took up the cause of a 35-year-old veteran named Ashli Babbitt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho killed Ashli Babbitt?\u201d he asked in a one-sentence statement on July 1, 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAn innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman,\u201d Trump said during a Fox News interview a few weeks later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, Babbitt was not an insurrectionist shot while trying to get close to the members of Congress<\/a> who were certifying the election results, the sole rioter killed by police that day. She was a martyr, someone who died for her beliefs. She was a woman who had died for lack of protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s framing of Babbitt\u2019s death in the months after he left office served as one of the guiding principles of his second term: the necessity of \u201cprotecting women\u201d and an insistence on identifying and eradicating those he sees as posing a threat to them.<\/p>\n

Who was Ashli Babbitt?<\/p>\n

She was an Air Force veteran<\/a> who had done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was married and divorced and then married again. She faced criminal charges<\/a> after an altercation with an ex-girlfriend of her second husband. She voted for Barack Obama<\/a>. She bought a pool<\/a> <\/a>care business<\/a> with her husband. She discovered the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon<\/a>, which asserted that Trump was trying to save the country from a cabal of Satan-worshipping child molesters installed within the United States government.<\/p>\n

Over time, Babbitt became increasingly steeped in QAnon and was primed to believe<\/a> the robustly disproved conspiracy<\/a> that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. So when Trump encouraged his followers to go to Washington to support him on Jan. 6, 2021, she did. While the election results were being officially certified by Congress, Trump addressed a crowd that included Babbitt. And when he encouraged them to go to the Capitol, many did \u2014 Babbitt among them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not everyone who went to the Capitol broke into the building, but she did. With a Trump flag draped over her shoulders like a superhero\u2019s cape, Babbitt was part of the group who tried to gain access to the Speaker\u2019s lobby, just outside the House chamber. Another rioter smashed glass. As Babbitt tried to crawl through, a Capitol police officer shot her from inside the lobby.<\/p>\n

Video footage from the day shows Babbitt falling backward into the crowd as blood pours out of her mouth. After the shooting, many rioters began to flee the Capitol grounds. Babbitt was transported to Washington Hospital Center. She was declared dead upon arrival.
The officer who killed Babbitt was cleared of wrongdoing<\/a>; Lt. Michael Byrd potentially saved lives by stopping the mob, lawmakers and police said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But her death gave Trump\u2019s MAGA movement something it needed: a martyr.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Crowd<\/a>Rioters storm the western front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (File photo by John Minchillo\/Associated Press)<\/p>\n

Religiosity moves in<\/p>\n

A religious frame has been present in Trump\u2019s politics since his rallies in the lead-up to the 2016 election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Sharlet, a veteran journalist and professor at Dartmouth College who was an early chronicler of the rise of Trumpism and its ties to religiosity, said these rallies were shaped by the prosperity gospel, a branch of Protestantism rooted in the supposition that, effectively, God wants you to be rich.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2020, the religious tenor was still there \u2014\u00a0but it had shifted to a more conspiratorial approach. Trump stopped merely \u201cwinking at QAnon\u201d and began \u201cinvoking that level of conspiratorial thinking that has been absorbed into the DNA of the movement,\u201d Sharlet said.<\/p>\n

Before Babbitt\u2019s death, Sharlet said, Trump had already been working to incorporate martyrs into his rhetoric, invoking a list of names, usually people who had been killed by immigrants in the country without legal status. They would typically fall into two categories, he said: \u201cblonde white women and promising young Black men\u201d \u2014 think\u00a0Jamiel Shaw Jr.<\/a>, a rising football star in the midst of college applications who was shot and killed by a gang member who was in the country illegally, or Sarah Root<\/a>, who was killed by an undocumented drunk driver the day after her graduation from college.<\/p>\n

Sharlet calls Babbitt \u201ca perfect storm\u201d: a white woman killed on camera in footage seen by millions, a Black man \u2014\u00a0 the Capitol police officer \u2014 responsible for her death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat changed everything,\u201d Sharlet said. \u201cThe first real martyr who really takes hold of Trumpism is a woman, and it gives the movement a real religiosity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it set the stage for Trump to ascend into a kind of religious figure himself after a would-be assassin shot him<\/a> in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery martyr disappears into the cult of personality,\u201d Sharlet said. \u201cShe was a placeholder. She keeps the cross warm until Trump gets up there and he\u2019s the martyr. Now, he\u2019s the martyr for us all \u2014 but it started with a certain appeal to women.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Martyrs can\u2019t speak<\/p>\n

Babbitt was an active participant in the insurrection \u2014\u00a0but that didn\u2019t mean she couldn\u2019t be reassigned the role of someone who needed protecting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sharlet recalled watching videos of Trump supporters talking about Babbitt in the wake of her death: \u201cThey\u2019re aging her backward, they\u2019re lowering her weight, they\u2019re lowering her height, they\u2019re turning her into a little girl.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a blueprint for what was to come, he said of Babbitt: \u201cThe blondeness is important, the smallness is important, but so is the camouflage of being a veteran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her race, too, was important, Sharlet said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about the whiteness of things. It\u2019s not enough for them that a woman be (killed),\u201d he said. \u201cShe has to be a little girl. She has to be white.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meghan Tschanz, a former missionary who has emerged as a critic of patriarchal systems in evangelical Christianity, drew a connection between Babbitt and Laken Riley<\/a>, a college student whose murder by an immigrant in the country illegally was highlighted by Trump. Both women\u2019s deaths became part of a larger narrative \u2014\u00a0one designed to accomplish a political goal, not mourn the victims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tschanz, who lives in Athens, Georgia \u2014 where Riley was killed \u2014 stressed that criticizing the politicization of Riley\u2019s death is in no way a dismissal of the reality and severity of her killing. Rather, she said, politicization can dilute the pain of the loss in service to a larger narrative.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgain and again, we see women die and the response isn\u2019t, \u2018Let\u2019s make it so women don\u2019t die.\u2019 It\u2019s, \u2018Let\u2019s make it so that I can use this to further my narrative that immigrants are evil,\u2019 \u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Riley\u2019s father, Jason Riley \u2014\u00a0a Trump supporter \u2014 told<\/a> NBC News about the pain of watching his daughter become a political tagline after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, at the time a strong Trump ally, heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech in 2024, urging him to say Riley\u2019s name.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s being used politically to get those votes. It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they\u2019re just using my daughter\u2019s name for that. And she was much better than that, and she should be raised up for the person that she is,\u201d Jason Riley said. \u201cShe was an angel.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a dynamic also echoed in Babbitt\u2019s death. Though Babbitt\u2019s mother, Michelle Witthoeft, emerged as a leading advocate for the release of those who were arrested for their actions on Jan. 6, she also has publicly grappled with the way in which her daughter\u2019s death became something other than an acute family tragedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Witthoeft told<\/a> The Washington Post in 2021, \u201cHalf the country loves her and half the country hates her,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s weird to have your child belong to the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Trump, Riley\u2019s and Babbitt\u2019s\u00a0deaths helped reinforce the message that women\u2019s lives are in danger and that they need to be saved \u2014\u00a0something he emphasized in his campaigns as he painted immigrants and his political opponents as threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all plays into the fears and vulnerabilities that women have to navigate, which is that women are more vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence and women are tasked culturally with caring for the home and for their children,\u201d said Hilary Matfess, an assistant professor at the University of Denver and the co-author of an analysis<\/a> done by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University on gender and the Jan. 6 insurrection. \u201cSo this message of scary immigrants are going to come in and destroy your communities with drugs and rape your women and children is intended to strike fear into a very specific demographic \u2014 namely, suburban white women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matfess pointed to how the role of martyr cemented a view of Babbitt for Trump\u2019s followers. She became someone who needed protecting, a figure whose memory is in need of constant, everlasting protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing put on a pedestal means you can\u2019t move around too much,\u201d Matfess said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \u2018protection racket\u2019<\/p>\n

Matfess said there is a long-standing academic notion of the \u201cprotection racket,\u201d in which a government offers protection from an imagined threat to deflect from the threat posed by the government itself. It\u2019s something that can be used to keep women in subservient roles \u2014 and thus effectively in need of some form of protection from others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration is not saying, \u2018Wow, we should really expand access to prenatal health care,\u2019 or \u2018We need more resources for women that are victims of domestic violence,\u2019 because it is not about protecting women,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s about protecting certain men\u2019s ability to wield power and influence under the banner of protection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Babbitt\u2019s death in some ways challenged the narrative too \u2014\u00a0she was part of the group trying to stop the certification of the election<\/a>, not sitting by.<\/p>\n

Matfess noted the ways that the Proud Boys \u2014 the far-right, all-men neo-fascist group that has become rigorous defenders of Trump and his agenda \u2014 insist on the fact that there are in fact no Proud Girls, often suggesting that the best way women can support the politics they espouse is by staying home and reproducing.<\/p>\n

Matfess points to early rumors from within the far right that Babbitt was part of a false flag mission \u2014\u00a0evidence that the movement had to grapple with a woman who was attacking, not asking for protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of utility to narratives that talk of attacks against women and children, and so it becomes that once they decided it wasn\u2019t a false flag, that she was there of her own political beliefs, it becomes a compelling narrative of a woman sacrificing herself for this movement. Whether or not the movement would have been kind to her had she lived is besides the point,\u201d Matfess said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe memorialization takes away the kind of difficult questions of how this movement would deal with women who are taking on more transgressive gender roles. Once someone\u2019s a hero, you can leave it at that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

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