Missouri Republican Eric Greitens Is Really Hoping Voters Like the Idea of a Violently Unhinged Senator

Missouri’s disgraced former governor-turned-senate candidate Eric Greitens released a new campaign video yesterday in which he, armed with a shotgun and accompanied by figures dressed in tactical military gear, says he’s “going RINO hunting”—a reference to “Republicans in name only,” the moniker reactionaries like Greitens give to conservatives they don’t see as being pro-Trump enough.

The video is very obviously a clunky PR-driven attempt to stoke the fires of the online outrage machine and enter the news cycle via rage clicks, and that plan worked. Facebook removed the ad and Twitter slapped a label on it stating it violated their terms of service but that it was in the “public’s interest” to leave it up, but the video was still shared far and wide Sunday, mostly via incensed quote tweets.

The plan behind the ad is so embarrassingly transparent: Post a video of yourself threatening to hunt your Republican colleagues, stir up outrage, accuse people of overreacting, and then take that message to multiple Fox News appearances. In fact, they’re already making headway moving through those steps. Just hours after the video was posted, Missouri’s Republican Senate Majority leader said he’d contacted law enforcement and Greitens’ campaign manager responded by mocking him on Twitter.

That’s not to say there was a better alternative, though. We’ve learned by now that ignoring this sort of unhinged, violent rhetoric doesn’t help quash it. The Kansas City Star summed it up well in their own op-ed condemning Greitens’ video:

The impulse to avert our eyes and hope this will all go away won’t work as a political strategy against the Greitens outrage machine. Many serious conservatives thought the best way to defuse Donald Trump’s clownish rhetoric in the 2016 presidential primary was to starve it of oxygen. After he lost the 2020 election, many hoped that simply not acknowledging his false screams about voter fraud would make him give them up. We know how those stories played out.

Greitens’ history of alleged violence

A campaign ad threatening—even jokingly—to hunt down political colleagues and opponents would be bad enough coming from anyone but it’s especially disturbing coming from Greitens. In 2018, he resigned in disgrace from his position as Governor after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting and blackmailing her.

According to the woman, she followed Greitens to his basement, at his insistence, for what she expected to be a consensual sexual encounter before he tied her up, blindfolded her, exposed her body, took a picture of her, and then coerced her into performing oral sex on him.

Then, earlier this year, Greitens’ ex-wife attested in a sworn affidavit as part of a custody dispute that he had physically assaulted both her and their then-three-year-old son.

Greitens has denied all of these allegations but he’s also chosen to lean in hard to the image of the dangerously violent asshole. In his attempt to re-enter politics, he had to choose: Would he work to shed that image or would he embrace it? He’d already made it clear he was choosing the latter and started presenting himself as the most Trumpian candidate in his Senate race. This new video just took that message to its most extreme form. And while Republicans have expressed concern that if Greitens were to win the primary, his extremism could cost them an otherwise locked-up seat in the general election, Greitens is banking on Republican voters connecting with his violent approach. Here’s hoping he’s wrong.

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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