Trump and Vance Are Hypocrites About Political Violence
Trump and Vance Are Hypocrites About Political Violence
When is it fair to blame a politician for inciting a bomb threat or an attempted assassination? Here are three rules.
ON SUNDAY, JD VANCE DISMISSED THE IDEA that he and Donald Trump bear any responsibility for the bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, in view of the incendiary smears the two men have been spreading against the city’s Haitian migrants.
“Are we not allowed to talk about these [immigration] problems because some psychopaths are threatening violence?” Vance asked CNN’s Dana Bash. The rhetoric and the violence were unrelated, he argued. He accused the media of falsely implying a causal connection in order to “silence the concerns of American citizens” about immigration.
But the next day, the circumstances changed, and Vance reversed himself. The Secret Service discovered and thwarted an assassination plot against Trump—and Vance immediately blamed the plot on Harris’s rhetoric.
“Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump,” Vance tweeted. “The gunman agreed, and used the exact same phrase.” In a speech in Georgia, Vance said it was entirely predictable, based on what Harris and other Democrats had said about Trump, that “some crazy person is going to take matters into their own hands and actually listen to the crazy rhetoric that you’re putting out there.”
Vance’s hypocrisy is obvious and contemptible. But it raises a good question: When politicians say things that could lead to violence—or that have already been followed by violence—what rules should we apply? When is the politician responsible for the violence? And when should the politician refrain from saying something that a dangerous person might seize on to justify committing a crime?
Here are three rules I would apply in these cases. First, always forbid and condemn political violence. Second, it’s okay to make upsetting allegations—even if they might be wrongly taken by some people as a license to commit violence—but only if the allegations are important and true. And third, never level a false accusation of incitement or violence, especially if you’re doing it to impede justice or suppress the truth.
Harris and Joe Biden are obeying these rules. Vance is breaking two of them. Trump is breaking all three.
Rule 1: Condemn political violence.
Vance has consistently denounced the bomb threats in Springfield. “We condemn all violence and condemn all threats of violence,” he declared on Face the Nation. “I want whoever made these threats to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Harris has affirmed the same principle—“I condemn political violence”—in her response to the assassination plot against Trump. So has Biden: There’s “no place for political violence in America. None. Zero. Never.”
Trump, despite multiple opportunities, hasn’t agreed. On Saturday, when he visited the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, a reporter asked him: “Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio?” Trump sidestepped the question and repeated his complaint about migrants. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said, but “I know that it’s [Springfield] been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing.”
In the three days since Trump was asked that question, he has posted several times on Truth Social, given two interviews, and spoken at a town hall. Not once has he denounced the bomb threats.
Rule 2. Tell the truth.
Trump and Vance claim that Biden and Harris have incited violence against Trump by depicting him as a menace to democracy. On Monday, in an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump cited Biden’s and Harris’s portrayal of him as a “threat to democracy.” Vance, in his tweet, cited Harris’s statement that “democracy is on the line” in the 2024 election.
But there’s a simple reason why Biden’s and Harris’s statements about Trump—unlike Trump’s and Vance’s statements about migrants in Springfield—are defensible: They’re true.
Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. As the House January 6th Committee meticulously documented, Trump didn’t just tell his supporters to march on the Capitol. He sat in front of a TV, watched the ensuing assault, and refused—despite entreaties from his staff and family—to tell the mob to go home.
Now Trump is promising to pardon many of the people convicted of crimes in that insurrection. He has called for terminating parts of the Constitution to return him to power. At rallies, he still tells his followers that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the only way he can lose is through cheating. And he’s spreading baseless lies about the security of mail-in voting in the 2024 election.
So, yes, Trump is a threat to democracy. And democracy is on the line.
You can’t make a similar case for Trump’s or Vance’s inflammatory statements about Haitians in Springfield. Those statements are false or unsubstantiated. The most prominent example—Trump’s claim in last week’s debate that recent immigrants to Springfield are “eating the pets of the people that live there”—has been pursued by many reporters and fact-checkers. Not one case has been found.
On the day of the debate, Vance tweeted about Springfield: “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” But that allegation, too, is false. “My son was not murdered,” says the child’s father. The death occurred in a car accident.
Vance says his allegations against the migrants are legitimate for two reasons. First, he says “multiple people have spoken about” these allegations. (“Spoken about” is a conveniently vague phrase that encompasses hearsay.) Second, he says that even if specific allegations don’t check out, he’s bringing attention to a larger truth: that Springfield is struggling to absorb the migrants.
“All that I have done is surface the complaints of my constituents,” Vance pleaded on CNN. He added: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In other words, Vance thinks he bears no responsibility to fact-check his allegations before he spews them, even if they lead to violence. He doesn’t even accept that it matters whether they turn out to be true.
He’s wrong. If you say something that leads to violence, you might be able to justify your statement by pointing out that you were telling an important truth. But you can’t justify triggering violence by spreading lies.
Rule 3: Don’t lie about violence to hide the truth.
Biden and Harris have condemned the bomb threats in Springfield. They’ve also condemned Trump for spouting lies about the migrants. But they’ve never suggested that Trump or Vance was directly involved in the bomb threats.
Vance has crossed that line. He persistently implies that people who have sued, impeached, prosecuted, or campaigned against Trump—a category that would include Biden, Harris, the Department of Justice, Democrats in Congress, attorneys general, district attorneys, and many others—are responsible for attempts on Trump’s life.
On August 21, at a rally in North Carolina, Vance said of Trump: “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. And they even tried to kill him.”
Two weeks later, at a rally in Georgia, Vance repeated: “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.”
This isn’t sloppiness. Vance is deliberately conflating these people—they, they, they—to delegitimize the legal cases against Trump. He’s signaling to voters that they should ignore Trump’s indictments and convictions because it’s all part of a corrupt scheme to destroy the former president, even to the point of murder.
Trump, likewise, is seeking to undercut his indictments and convictions by misrepresenting the assassination attempts. In his interview with Fox News Digital, he blamed the latest assassination plot against him on “rhetoric and lawsuits” from his enemies. “These are the things that dangerous fools, like the shooter, listen to,” he said.
The upshot, according to Vance, isn’t just that the prosecutions should be dropped. It’s that Trump’s critics should shut up altogether. As Vance put it in a speech on Tuesday, “It’s time to say to the Democrats, to the media, to everybody that has been attacking this man and trying to censor this man for going on ten years: Cut it out, or you’re going to get somebody killed.”
IT’S LAUGHABLE THAT TRUMP AND VANCE are howling about incitement. In the last three weeks, these guys have essentially accused their opponents of homicide. On August 29, speaking about the parents of American service members killed in Afghanistan, Trump told a crowd in Michigan: “Joe Biden killed their children by incompetence. . . . Kamala killed their children, just as though they had a gun in their hand, by gross incompetence.”
In a press conference on Friday, Trump repeated: “Just as though Kamala shot them with a pistol in her hand—or his hand—they were killed by Biden and Kamala.”
Meanwhile, on September 4, Vance told a crowd in Arizona that “Liz Cheney was willing to kill thousands of your children” to transform Afghanistan into a “thriving liberal democracy.”
When Trump and Vance talk about incitement or violence—whether it’s to accuse their opponents or exonerate themselves—they’re not looking for rules that would apply to everyone. They’re just looking for advantage. But exposing their hypocrisy is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to protect and encourage truth-tellers in our society while reducing the risk of violence. These three rules are a start.