This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump quickly took up the cause of a 35-year-old veteran named Ashli Babbitt.
“Who killed Ashli Babbitt?” he asked in a one-sentence statement on July 1, 2021.
“An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman,” Trump said during a Fox News interview a few weeks later.
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 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.
Trump’s framing of Babbitt’s death in the months after he left office served as one of the guiding principles of his second term: the necessity of “protecting women” and an insistence on identifying and eradicating those he sees as posing a threat to them.
