Failed assassination of Trump: quick thoughts a day after.
Once political violence is normalized in one area, as with BLM's "mostly peaceful" riots, it gets normalized across the spectrum, as seen on January 6, in anti-Semitic campus "actions" and on July 13.
Our two main political parties need a time-out. We require a period of national mourning and a rethink of how we do politics. Some of us understand how to disagree, even vehemently, without resorting to zero-sum extinction thinking. But an increasing number of our countrymen are no longer built for today’s level of vitriol, ad hominem, and demonization. We must change. Here’s how.
Free speech requires guardrails. Political candidates can no longer be allowed by persons of goodwill to say that an opponent is a "threat to democracy," or "Hitler," or "a fascist," or a “dictator,” or “an authoritarian,” or a “strongman” just because that opponent wants to, for example, restore order to the border, deport illegal immigrant felons, or see law and order in our streets. Those are reasonable positions that do not warrant inflammatory, let alone apocalyptic, rhetoric. No policy in Trump’s four years in office justifies calling him a “Nazi.” These are ginned-up, highly coded, and cruelly effective dog whistles deliberately designed to incite fear in voters and get them to take action to “Get Trump.” That rhetoric must stop now.
Secondly, a certain party must cease its disingenuous habit of cherry-picking words out of context to advance its “threat to democracy” narrative. For example, we know Trump was talking about the energy industry when he talked about a “bloodbath.” We know Trump was comically turning a false Democratic trope on its head when he figuratively said he’d be a “dictator for just one day” to advance his normie GOP policy agenda. We know, and fact-checker SNOPES confirms, that Trump was not praising Nazis in Charlottesville when he said there were “good people on both sides.” We know for certain that Trump had not and was not colluding with Russia when he jokingly asked in 2016 for Putin to reveal what was in the emails that Hillary criminally hid from law enforcement. And in Democrats’ 2020 extension of that same dirty trick, we know that the existence of Hunter’s laptop was not “Russian disinformation.”
As Democrats plan to run that same “foreign interference” play again in 2024, claiming for months that Biden’s cognitive challenges were examples of Russian-amplified “deep fakes,” it's high time to give it a rest. You are persuading no one. These disingenuous little tricks and play-dumb rhetorical jiu-jitsu aren’t working anymore, except to encourage literal killers––who do not get Trump’s humor and the too-clever-by-half meta games around his statements— towards violence.
Halting incendiary rhetoric, lies, and disinformation starts at the top. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that Trump is a "genuine threat to this nation." That the president, after this horrific tragedy in Butler, PA, canceled his massive ad buy featuring this very “threat to democracy” narrative tells you everything. Joe Biden knows such messaging is inappropriate and dangerous and that anyone who trucks in it is laying the groundwork for future political violence. He knows that Trump never planned nor encouraged political violence. He knows that Trump will give up power in 2028 if he wins reelection. He knows that he is lying about Trump as a “threat to democracy,” or why would we take the ads down? If that threat is so existential, you’d keep the ads up! Biden and the Democrats have been busted. And now we all know that any time they say they are fearful of “attacks on journalists” or “Trump’s refusal to give up power,” it’s both a projection and a lie.
Biden’s too-late message to turn down the rhetoric must trickle down through the entire Democratic ecosystem. Democrat Representative and Biden Crime Family apologist Dan Goldman said that Trump needs to be “eliminated.” Democrat billionaire Reid Hoffman said he wished he made Trump "an actual martyr." Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson urged people to "go put a bullet in Donald Trump." Comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a mock severed head of the former President. These incidents are all of a piece.
While I agree with JD Vance that "The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” I disagree with Vance’s conclusion that such rhetoric “led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.” I would frame it a little differently. With their Trump-is-Hitler narratives and their failure to call out the BLM/Antifa Summer of Insurrection with remotely the same obsessive fervor they directed at J6, Biden and the Democrats created an environment and permission structure for political violence. Their failure to actively call out the violent threats against Supreme Court Justices added to that ecosystem. Until Democrats refrain from their zero-sum rhetoric, political violence against the GOP and Trump will happen again. Biden's lame Sunday night speech failed to reassure voters that the Democratic Party has gotten the memo. If the President is serious about bringing the country together and learning from the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, he needs to swear off his “threat to democracy” and “dictator” language and publicly shame anyone who uses the dangerous "Hitler" and "fascism" tropes.
After all, if you believe that someone is Hitler, what wouldn’t you do to destroy them? That kind of end-times language and imagery motivates disturbed minds to perform evil acts. What we saw on Saturday was not a one-off deal. We saw how violent rhetoric towards Republicans helped inspire a rabid Sanders supporter to shoot up a Republican baseball practice in 2017, severely wounding House Whip Steve Scalise. We saw Democratic leaders allow protesters to engage in outrageously disordered and threatening language outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, creating the bright line for one person to try and assassinate Judge Bret Kavanaugh. And let's not forget about the BLM/Antifa Summer of Insurrection that Democratic politicians enabled and supported with bail money and more—and still refuse to mention in today’s discussions of political violence—let alone Dem. Rep. Maxine Waters shouts to attack members of Trump's Cabinet.
The Steele Dossier, the Trump/Russia hoax, FISA lies, the 51 CIA leader disinformation scheme, and state-coordinated and paid censorship of Americans all remain unpunished Democratic attacks on our republic. It's not wrong for Republicans to seek indictments for those acts of sabotage, treason, and election interference, but let’s work to have a reformed and neutral DOJ undertake those assignations. A Republican candidate promising to prosecute a single person represents the very weaponization of justice that Democrats Alvin Bragg and Letitia James undertook in singling out Donald Trump for prosecution before Trump was even charged with anything.
“Lock her up” (heard at Trump rallies in 2016) and “lock him up” (heard at Biden rallies today) need to stop. We need to cease incendiary rhetorical practices and lawfare while trying to recreate an apolitical and balanced Department of Justice and intel services. The job of these essential agencies is not to settle political scores but to call balls and strikes. These institutions and others are now corrupted by vengeance, bias, and hate.
Republicans must continue to call out the violence of January 6, even though Democrats still refuse to talk about far more common examples of left-wing violence and terror. Political violence is ALWAYS wrong, regardless of party or grievance. We must invoke "the better angels of our nature" no matter the evil perpetrated against us. And that means taking the edge off some of our attacks. It’s important to point out differences between the parties, but both Trump and Biden need to moderate their tone and focus more on substance and what unites us, which is plenty. Most Americans want cheaper gas, a secure border, and criminals behind bars.
Finally, we need a new kind of media and social media that moves away from stoking fight-or-flight hysteria that creates an incubating climate for the political violence we saw Saturday. And we need search engines and artificial intelligence that are not biased by design against one team. We have weapons of mass indoctrination, censorship, and destruction--media, social media, and search--being used to sort and inflame our people. It must stop. We need to get back to being human. That pundits like Nate Silver would choose this day—after an assassination attempt!—to publicly opine on the status of the presidential race, who’s up and who’s down, is grotesque and sick. That David Frum, in a one-sided polemic in The Atlantic, would, just one day after this deep tragedy, STILL indulge in the Trump-deranged trope that Trump is a “would-be dictator” is simply breathtaking in its tone-deaf insensitivity.
Then, the capper, Biden’s outrageous White House address that focused on the few examples of political violence against Democrats but left out the BLM Summer of Insurrection and the attack that almost killed Steve Scalise, let alone the left-wing attack on Rand Paul. He then repeated the Democrat “foreign actors” lie and asked that parties make arguments in “good faith” when the Democrats clearly have not. We deserve better than this teleprompter hackery.
We cannot fully know the motivations of the twenty-year-old killer, the aptly named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was a registered Republican who recently donated to Democrats. But we can speculate that, like the young serial killers depicted in the profound Finnish documentary White Rage, the second he pulled the trigger was likely the happiest moment of a life no doubt filled with tremendous pain, abuse, and torment.
The hero of that dark Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was Corey Comperatore, the fireman who died protecting his family. That's who we must honor and model in this heartbreaking moment.