The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
They are telling a story in which the leading characters are the former president and his Republicans, and Joe Biden and his Democrats. The plot is about a nation on fire, a people at war with themselves, and so forth. Some have even depicted Sunday’s prime-time address by the president as if he were “bothsidesing” the issue of political violence.
He wasn’t. Instead, Joe Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence. “Violence has never been the answer” to solving the problems of American democracy, he said, “whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
That Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence seems to have gone over some heads. Ditto for the fact that he correctly included in those examples the attempted assassination of Trump. For some reason, it seems hard for members of the press and pundit corps to believe that America’s leading advocate of rightwing political violence could be a victim of it. And so dedicated are they to telling a story that blames both sides that it’s equally hard for them to believe Biden and the Democrats have nothing to do with it. There’s only one side to blame here. Trump and the GOP have reaped what they sowed.
Soon after Donald Trump was whisked off the stage in Pennsylvania, the Republicans began creating conditions in which Biden and the Democrats seem to be responsible for Trump’s assassination attempt. US Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, is representative in this. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he said. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
No, it didn’t.
Calling out Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies is democratic politics. Characterizing him as a fraud, insurrectionist and rapist is based on fact. Saying a convicted felon shouldn’t be president is common sense.
Only Trump and the Republicans are to blame for this. They were inciting rightwing political violence before as well as after the failed paramilitary takeover of the US government on January 6. (A shooter massacred Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, Hispanics in El Paso in 2019, and Black people in Buffalo in 2022. Each echoed Trump’s rightwing views.) Though it has now come for one of their own, they won’t do any soul-searching. They can only blame their enemies for their own transgressions. And the press and pundit corps are playing along.
I don’t know why the assassin, whom I will not name, did what he did. No one yet knows. As is the case with many or most shooters, we may never know his true motives. What we do know is he was a young, white man and a registered Republican, who was apparently steeped in a gun culture that habitually takes an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment. Perhaps he was mentally ill. Perhaps he wanted to be infamous. Perhaps, like other rightwing shooters, he wanted to start a “race war.” Almost certain is he was a kook. Certain is he believed political violence is an acceptable alternative to democratic politics.
I also know that looking at an attempted assassination out of its proper context is a good way to misunderstand it. Its proper context is this: the United States averages about one mass shooting a day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. This year, the total is expected to surpass 500, which would be the fifth time in five years that has happened.
Such frequency is why the US surgeon general said, last month, that gun violence is a public health crisis. “People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told the Associated Press. “America should be a place where all of us can go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.”
(By the way, Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, and the shooter, who was shot and killed at the scene, obtained his semiautomatic rifle legally. That puts the Secret Service in a position in which it can’t do anything until there’s gunfire. The FBI, while investigating the crime as a potential act of domestic terrorism, said the shooter acted alone.)
America should be that kind of place, but the Republicans have either stood in the way of federal gun-control legislation or they have, at the state level, expanded access to guns, even guns that are designed to kill in bulk, like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that killed a Trump supporter over the weekend and came close to killing Trump himself. The Democrats, meanwhile, have been united in trying to regulate access to guns and, in the process, in trying to thwart mass death.
(More background: The Capitol police investigated more than 9,600 threats against congresspeople this year. That’s 10 times higher than eight years ago. And Robert P. Jones, head of Public Religion Research Institute, said: “We have been tracking an uptick in tolerance for political violence and an uptick in violent rhetoric in our national conversations over the last few years. Self-identified Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to say they believe true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”)
It seems no one is talking about Trump’s attempted assassination as part of a larger trend in gun violence in America. And because it seems no one is talking about it that way, no one seems to have noticed that the Republicans are upset about one of their own being a target of attempted murder while throwing up their hands in collective helplessness in every other case. Something must be done about the Democrats’ rhetoric, I guess, but nothing needed to be done, say, after a gunman entered a primary school to shoot 20 first graders to pieces.
Given this context, it should not be surprising that Trump and the Republicans are themselves exceptionally vulnerable to rightwing political violence and threats of it. The policies they have enacted, and the anti-democratic attitudes they have popularized, have literally put them in life-threatening situations. Constantly feeling like their lives are in peril may explain why so many congressional Republicans, who had been reluctant to support Trump after the J6 insurrection, ultimately got in line. “Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” wrote Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert, in late 2022.
The assassination of Trump was already part of rightwing political discourse. “Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and rightwing provocateur Ivan Raiklin have speculated for months that removing Trump from the running — they speculated about assassination — would open the way for Trump’s far-right former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and appeared to be putting pressure on Trump to name Flynn as vice president,” wrote Professor Heather Cox Richardon this morning. “Yesterday, Raiklin posted on social media a ‘Trump/Flynn 2024’ graphic with the legend ‘FAFO,’ under the words ‘Assassination-Proof.’”
Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, are the pro-democracy party. Not only are they against political violence, because it undermines and enfeebles democratic politics, but they are also not vulnerable to it like the Republicans are. As I said in February: “When a Democrat goes to a party function, they do not encounter other Democrats legally carrying semiautomatic rifles. A Republican, on the other hand, does. Someone calling you out for telling the truth about the big lie is one thing. When he’s slinging an AR-15 over his shoulder, it’s another.”
The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
It isn’t.
It’s what happens when you unleash rightwing political violence.
Eventually, it comes for you.
