CNN
—
Former President Donald Trump responded to a second assassination attempt that he blamed on inflammatory political rhetoric by further inciting the situation.
Trump, whose ear was pierced by the fatal shooting of a rallygoer in July, initially acted like a different person, telling Washington Examiner reporter Salina Zito that he saw a chance to unite the country and the world. But that aspiration lasted no longer than the opening paragraphs of his convention speech.
After the Secret Service thwarted a gunman believed to have ambushed former President Trump at a Florida golf course on Sunday, Trump responded differently. He accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of warning him that he was a threat to democracy and inviting assassins to target him.
Without providing evidence, Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday that the suspect “believed what Biden and Harris said and followed what they said,” adding, “I’m being shot at because of what they say. I’m in a position to save our country. They’re destroying our country from the inside out.”
“It’s called the enemy from within,” Trump said, using a common metaphor for a totalitarian leader. He warned that “dangerous fools” like the suspect in Sunday’s attack will listen to Democratic leaders and respond to what he falsely claims is a concerted attempt by the White House to use the justice system to persecute Trump.
Trump’s running mate was even more blunt.
“The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last few months, but two have tried to kill Donald Trump,” said Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio.
“I would say this is strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and stop this nonsense.”
The Republican vice presidential nominee recently denied sedition charges for making a string of unfounded claims about Haitian refugees eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and then making bomb threats against hospitals and schools.
Being charged with attempted murder twice in the space of two months would weigh heavily on anyone. Trump also faces an election less than 50 days away, with most polls showing him and his vice president in a close race.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that someone who is the target of an assassination “can be pretty sensitive, can be pretty upset, can be pretty anxious, so I think that’s understandable.”
Attempting to decide the outcome of an election by assassinating a presidential candidate is abhorrent to anyone who believes in democracy and the right of voters to choose their leaders. The exact motives of the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, are also unclear, but he has long been a proponent of increased aid to Ukraine, a position that contradicts Trump’s vow to end the war with Russia.
But Trump’s insistence that Biden and Harris bear direct responsibility underscores the extreme nature of his own political instincts.
The claim that Trump could be killed if he warns that he is perceived as a threat to democracy is particularly harsh. What Trump is implying is that it is unfair for his opponents to point out the truth. Trump’s past actions – his attempts to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s votes will be rigged – suggest that he poses a danger to America’s democratic institutions. Trump’s apparent willingness to stifle free speech may be a dark harbinger of how he might behave if elected to a second term.
Trump played a similar political card during last week’s presidential debate when Harris threatened to abolish the Constitution and use the Justice Department as a weapon against political opponents. Harris said that the Supreme Court and Vance would not be able to stop Trump if he returned to the White House, and that “it’s up to the American people to stop him.” The vice president was clearly speaking in a political context, to which Trump replied, “I might as well have taken a bullet in my head because of what they’re saying about me.”
Despite the heated political exchanges, there was a moment on Monday that reminded us of a lost political normalcy: Biden and Trump spoke by phone, with the president expressing relief that his former rival was safe. The Republican candidate said in a statement to CNN that it was “a very great call.”
Incitement and inflammatory rhetoric is often in the eye of the beholder. Republicans, for example, were outraged when Biden claimed in August 2022 that the philosophical foundations of the MAGA movement were something like “semi-fascism” (though the accusation has not become a staple of the president’s rhetoric). Democratic Rep. Daniel Goldman of New York said in an interview last year that Trump needed to be “removed,” a remark Vance addressed on Monday. Goldman quickly apologized for his “poor choice of words” and said he intended no harm to Trump.
But if Democrats can be blamed for going overboard at times, Trump has established a political brand with the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by any president or former president in modern U.S. history. The scale and intensity of his invective pales in comparison to anything the Democrats have hurled at him. He has called Harris a “fascist” in almost every public appearance. For example, he said on August 26 that “an incompetent fascist is running” in Virginia. He used similar rhetoric in his campaigns on August 23, August 17, and August 3.
Earlier this year, Trump claimed Biden was running a “Gestapo regime,” a reference to the genocidal Nazi secret police. He has echoed the words of some of history’s worst tyrants, calling his political opponents “vermin” and warning that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.
And when he refused to concede that he had lost the 2020 election, Trump called his supporters to Washington, DC, and told them to “fight like hell” or there would be no country. Trump’s supporters then stormed the US Capitol, trying to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Trump then called those arrested in the January 6, 2021 incident political prisoners and said he would consider pardoning them if he returned to the White House in November.
Trump still warns he will only accept the results of this year’s election if he finds them fair, and that he will jail government officials and political opponents if he returns to power.
“He’s stoking people’s fears, he’s stoking people’s anxiety. He defines us by hate and fear,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., said at a campaign event for Harris on Monday. “This violence has to stop, but we have to understand who he is, what he is, how complicit he is in it,” she said, adding, “He has not said he will accept the results of the election.”
Social media has often helped Trump inject venom into politics. After Sunday’s incident, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, X owner Elon Musk, questioned why Trump has faced two assassination attempts while his rivals have never faced one. “And no one’s even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote in a post he later deleted. He later claimed he’d been joking, but given America’s violent political history and four presidential assassinations, it’s hard to imagine people finding such sarcasm funny.
The words and actions of Trump and his allies are also putting other people’s lives at risk. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a former government infectious disease expert, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this year that attacks on Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at a congressional hearing, for example, accelerate the pace of death threats. “There is a segment of the public that believes that nonsense,” Dr. Fauci said.
Media organizations and campaign staff have also been targets of Trump’s baseless attacks and face threats, and prosecutors and judges who are assigned to Trump’s cases and are the targets of his daily verbal attacks require special security.
And in the shocking aftermath of a new apparent attempt on President Trump’s life, the impact of Trump and Vance’s comments is becoming clear in Springfield, Ohio.
After Trump exaggerated the false claims at the debate, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine deployed the State Highway Patrol to monitor schools in the city that had received bomb threats. Elsewhere in Springfield, classes at Wittenberg University were held remotely Monday as campus police and local police assessed email threats of bombing and campus shootings aimed at “members of the Haitian community,” the university said.
In an interview with State of the Union, Vance said the suggestion that he or Trump did anything to provoke such intimidation was “repulsive.”
It’s also repulsive that someone would try to assassinate a former president who ran democratically for office, but the historical record shows that while Trump was a victim of a toxic political culture, he was also one of its chief instigators.