The Truth About Political Violence
To condemn the attack on Trump’s life requires being honest about his candidacy.
THE FAILED ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE former president Donald Trump is a horror show. One person is dead, two are critically injured, and a terrible blow has been struck against American democracy. It cannot be stressed enough: Violence should have no place in American political life.
But one cannot let the matter rest there. Following the old maxim of never letting a crisis go to waste, it took only minutes for Trump’s allies and supporters to turn the bloody episode into a battering ram against Democrats and the media.
“On a daily basis, MSNBC tells its audience that Trump is a threat to democracy, an authoritarian in waiting, and a would-be dictator if no one stops him. What did they think would happen?” asked conservative commentator Erick Erickson.
Over at CNN, Republican cheerleader Scott Jennings opined that “I hate to say it, but the rhetoric around [Trump] over the last few weeks, that if he wins an election, our country will end, our democracy will end, it’s the last election we’ll ever have—these things have consequences.”
According to former Attorney General Bill Barr, “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy. He is not.”
Sen. J.D. Vance, reportedly a top contender to be Trump’s vice president, was more explicit in blaming Democrats:
DO THESE VOICES have a point?
We do not yet know the motives of the would-be assassin, a 20-year-old Pennsylvanian registered to vote as a Republican. He may well have been a deranged figure in the mold of Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin, John Hinckley. But whatever turns out to be the case, we cannot allow this episode to obscure several vitally important truths.
First, Donald Trump does in fact pose a threat to American democracy. It was Trump himself who led a multipronged conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election, an action for which he has been indicted and is facing multiple felony counts. It was Trump himself who called for casting away the Constitution in a 2022 Truth Social post about the 2020 election: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” And it was Trump who declared that, if elected, he will become a dictator but only on “Day One.”
Second, there is indeed a celebration of violence and a whiff of fascism emanating from Trump and the MAGA crowd that surrounds him. After all, it is Trump himself—and figures close to him—who for years now have been stoking the flames of discord in fascist-lite mode.
The examples are legion.
Given the opportunity in a 2020 debate to condemn white supremecists and militia groups and to renounce violence, all Trump would say to the paramilitary Proud Boys was, “Stand back and stand by.” They did stand by. On January 6th, five people died as a consequence of the insurrection that Trump incited, with the Proud Boys taking part. Repeating his false claims of election fraud—“We won this election, and we won it by a landslide”—Trump said to a roaring crowd at his rally the morning of January 6th, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In short order, scenes of violence erupted at the U.S. Capitol, interrupting the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history. Leaders of the Proud Boys have been convicted of sedition for their role in the violence. Trump has suggested that, if he is re-elected, he would consider pardoning them.
After Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband, was attacked with a hammer, fracturing his skull, Trump repeatedly mocked him, making light of the violent assault. At one rally, Trump said if re-elected he would “stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi,“ before asking a crowd of supporters, “How’s her husband doing by the way?” and saying a “wall around her house” didn’t do a “good job” of protecting him. The MAGA crowd roared with laughter.
We should also not lose sight of terrible instances of violence that can be traced to the xenophobia that Trump has cultivated so assiduously. Announcing his campaign in 2015, Trump said:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
A line can be drawn between such incendiary words—repeated multiple times on other occasions—and the El Paso Walmart massacre where in 2019 a young man murdered twenty-three people and wounded twenty-two others in a rampage carried out with the explicit intent to end a “Hispanic invasion” by killing immigrants and Mexicans in the West Texas border city of El Paso.
So too in 2018, the antisemitic shooting attack that took the lives of eleven congregants and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, was carried out by a man stirred to action by the supposed threat posed by immigration. Referring to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the perpetrator wrote on the social media platform Gab that “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
“Almost any criticism of Trump,” writes the journalist Edward Luce, “is already being spun by MAGA as an incitement to assassinate him. This is an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop him from regaining power.” Luce is exactly right.
A climate of violence and fear has indeed been fostered in the United States over the last decade—but its primary source has been Trump himself. Echoing the language of the Nazis, Trump has called his opponents “vermin” and said that immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the country. It is a grim irony that, even as Trump’s supporters bemoan supposedly inflammatory rhetoric, Trump—and the country as a whole—have become its victims. And it is an additional, terrible irony that, Trump having narrowly survived this attempt on his life, may very well succeed in turning it to his advantage.
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