A liberal organization pushing President Donald Trump’s impeachment and denouncing the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a terrorist organization has also launched a campaign to “Take Out Scalise.” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was seriously wounded last year in a shooting at a practice for the Congressional Baseball Game.
Mad Dog PAC is most notorious for posting a billboard reading “IMPEACHMENT NOW: MAKE AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN” along a road leading to President Donald Trump’s “winter White House,” the Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.
Mad Dog PAC erected the billboard just before Trump’s trip home from the airport during Easter vacation in March.
Mad Dog PAC has placed messages on 58 billboards across the country and aims to put up several hundred by the end of the year, Claude Taylor, the liberal group’s chairman, told The Ledger, a newspaper in Lakeland, Fla.
Website screenshot showing a map of Mad Dog PAC’s billboards across the U.S.
“People know that President Trump is a crook, and we’re going to do something about it,” Taylor said. “Individual Democratic candidates, they will be there to offer a positive economic message, but honestly that’s not our job. We are tossing mortars at the other side. We’re not offering policy prescriptions. We’re attack dogs; that’s what we’re here for.”
Taylor told The Ledger he was a “low-level” official in the Bill Clinton administration and worked on Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns. He said Mad Dog PAC formed in December and rented its first billboards in January.
Mad Dog PAC seems not to have yet erected the billboard against Scalise. The proposed billboard reads “$teve $calise LOVED voting away your healthcare. VOTE HIM OUT!” The website requests a donation in order to put up the sign, and issues the call to “TAKE OUT SCALISE.”
Mad Dog PAC website screenshot, site asks for donations in order to “TAKE OUT SCALISE.”
This aggressive language, coupled with Taylor’s declaration that their organization is “tossing mortars,” seems particularly dangerous in America’s polarized climate. Scalise returned to the House of Representatives in September, after months of recovery from the shooting. The shooter, James Hodgkinson, “liked” many liberal organizations on Facebook. One of them, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), had repeatedly attacked Scalise. The SPLC’s “hate map” also inspired a terrorist attack in 2012.
Mad Dog PAC has attacked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), and many others across the country, but the push for donations in order to attack Scalise, with the language pushing to “TAKE OUT SCALISE,” seems particularly noxious.
As for impeaching President Trump, Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have avoided pushing for impeachment, in order to win the 2018 midterm elections. Liberal activists like Tom Steyer, however, have aggressively advocated impeaching Trump and removing him from office.
The issue will only take on more salience as Steyer’s impeachment campaign has given an important shot-in-the-arm to liberal activism. His email list of impeachment supporters will likely prove essential to Democratic election efforts in November, but even more so in 2020. Billboards like those launched by Mad Dog PAC — noxious as they are — are just the beginning.
