Hours after Donald Trump was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin, his most avid high-profile supporters were hard at work pinning blame for the shooting on what they call overheated rhetoric by Democrats who have been pointing at his criminal record and his links to the authoritarian Project 2025.
According to Slate political analyst Emily Tankin, that concerted effort has less to do with cooling down potential violence and more to do with undercutting the Democrat's seeming strategy of holding Trump's record — as well as the Jan. 6 insurrection — up to the light for voters before they cast their votes.
In other words, as Tankin wrote, it is a trap that Democrats should not fall into if they wish to be successful in November.
Citing social media posts by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) who wrote, "Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination," and Don Trump Jr. who added, "Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap," despite the fact the shooter was a registered Republican, the analyst pointed out it is obvious how the revised Trump campaign strategy is playing out.
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"It aims to silence criticism," Tankin continued. "The assassination attempt does not erase the former president’s promises to gut the bureaucracy to better bend it to his will and to deploy the military domestically to carry out mass deportations. It does not allow him to escape criticism of his refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 presidential election or his attempt to invalidate votes cast in majority Black cities for Joe Biden."
"The point is not that Vance and company—in encouraging Trump’s violent language while chastising his political detractors—are hypocritical. They are, but hypocrisy is so common in American politics as to be barely worth noting," she wrote. "Rather, the point is that would-be autocrats and their supporters are not bringing about unity or calm, or lowering the political temperature between rival factions, by blaming those who criticize their political programs."
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