Victor Marx’s “History of Explosive Anger and Violent Incidents [Are] Raising Questions About His Fitness for Office”

Victor Marx’s “History of Explosive Anger and Violent Incidents [Are] Raising Questions About His Fitness for Office”

New reporting from The New York Times and The Daily Beast dives into Colorado Republican nominee for governor Victor Marx’s violent past and disturbing comments that are causing Colorado Republicans to openly distance themselves from their gubernatorial nominee.

The Daily Beast unveils Marx’s own description of “slamming” his wife into a door, and throwing his son “across the room.” He also said he believes God “gave [him] a gift for violence.”

Marx’s alarming proclivity for violence is “[splintering] Colorado’s beleaguered Republican Party,” with many worried he could “be a body blow in a once-purple state where Republicans hold no statewide office.”

Read more below about Marx’s “dark past” and record of violence – and how it is alarming Coloradans across the political spectrum:

The Daily Beast: ‘Christian Warrior’ Candidate’s Dark Past Revealed

• A MAGA-backed ministry leader vying to be Colorado’s next governor once laughed about slamming his wife into a door, recounted how he threw his toddler across the room and declared that God gave him a “gift” for violence.

• Fresh videos and posts unearthed by the Daily Beast paint an even bigger picture of a man with a history of explosive anger and violent incidents, raising questions about his fitness for office as the midterm elections loom.

• In a 2021 video, for example, Marx, 61, recalled becoming “infuriated” after his wife told him she no longer needed martial arts training because she was married to a Marine black belt.
• “She goes, ‘I can handle myself’. I said, ‘You can?’ And I remember grabbing her, slamming her into our front door,” he laughed during an interview on a podcast called Protector Nation.

• “I mean, it was a decent push. It’d be a bouncing push, right? She hit that, bent over and started crying, facing the opposite way.”

• In his own podcast in 2020, he also described an incident in which his son, who was then a toddler, pushed his young daughter so hard she started screaming.
• “I reacted so fast and so disproportionately that I snatched him up and threw him across the room,” Marx said, later adding that “he started crying. And I’ll never forget, I went, what was that? I mean, I couldn’t believe it.”

• He has also recounted punching an inmate at a juvenile facility until the man was bleeding, intimidating a mental-health provider by blocking the door and telling him he would never have time to call for help, and pulling a Marine Corps knife on a psychiatrist.

• “I don’t know, I feel like God gave me a gift for violence, against a manifestation of evil,” [Marx] told the crowd.

The New York Times: He Says He Killed a Man and Cast Out Demons. He Wants to Run Colorado.

• Mr. Marx’s biography, from an abusive childhood in Mississippi to commando-style ministry missions, is the centerpiece of his long-shot run to become Colorado’s first Republican governor in two decades. But his outsized, sometimes hard-to-verify claims have made his campaign a late-night punchline and splintered Colorado’s beleaguered Republican Party.

• Grassroots conservative evangelicals have embraced Mr. Marx, who has never held elected office, as a spiritual warrior. But some establishment Republicans call him unqualified and say that his candidacy could be a body blow in a once-purple state where Republicans hold no statewide office. The party is fighting to retain three competitive seats in Congress.

• “He is not fit to be the governor,” said Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chairman who plans to vote for an independent. “I want Victor Marx to lose by as large a margin as possible. This party has got to come to its senses.”

• Mr. Marx’s Republican critics fear that his candidacy, dogged by campaign-finance violations and questions about truthfulness, could hurt the party in the midterms and reduce it to a superminority in the state legislature.

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