(WASHINGTON) — When former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in July, he made an initial pitch for unity. It didn’t last long.
And he’s taken a decidedly different tack after a second apparent assassination attempt Sunday at his Florida golf club.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump laid blame for the political violence on Democrats, telling Fox News Digital the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was “causing me to be shot at” while also asserting they are “destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Harris, he posted on social media, “has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
He also claimed, without evidence, that the suspects in both cases were “radical left” despite their motives not having been publicly determined. (Investigators are currently examining Florida suspect Ryan Wesley Routh’s frustration with Trump’s position on Ukraine, sources told ABC News. In the Pennsylvania rally shooting, the suspected gunman, Thomas Mathew Crooks, was a registered Republican but had also made a small donation to a progressive group in 2021.)
Regardless, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, doubled down on the “blame Democrats” strategy at a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday.
“I think that 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 10 years, cut it out or you’re going to get somebody killed,” Vance said.
Susan Benesch, founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said Trump’s statements are “impossible not to put it in the context of his relentless use of violent rhetoric.”
“So, he’s a pot calling the kettle black,” Benesch said. “At the same time, that doesn’t mean that it is false when he says his political opponents are describing him as a threat to democracy.”
Harris and Biden condemned Sunday’s incident and shared their relief that Trump was safe. Biden called Trump and they had a “nice” conversation, the former president told ABC News. Harris said she also checked in with Trump and “told him what I have said publicly, I said there is no place for political violence in our country.”
“We can and should have healthy debates and discussion and disagreements, but not resort to violence to resolve those issues,” Harris said.
Still, Trump’s campaign has shared a list of over 50 quotes from Democrats they suggested lead to the second assassination attempt. Most of them include language from Biden, Harris and other party leaders that cast Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
The statements were often made when the lawmakers were discussing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, or Trump’s pledges to take political retribution if elected in November.
Republican leaders are also pointing to a 2023 comment from Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman in which he said Trump was “destructive to democracy” and should be “eliminated” — which Goldman apologized for, saying while he believed Trump should be defeated in the election he “certainly wish no harm to him and do not condone political violence.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked on Tuesday if President Biden would stop calling Trump a “threat to democracy” given recent developments. Jean-Pierre suggested he would not, saying he had a responsibility to “be honest with the American people” about the possible dangers posed by the former president.
Others have also noted a contrast between Democrats’ criticism of Trump and Trump’s more inflammatory — and sometimes patently false — statements on everything from election integrity to immigration to his targeting of perceived political enemies.
In one more extreme example, Trump appeared to defend the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” telling ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl “the people were very angry.” Though Trump has adamantly denied claims from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that she heard Trump say “hang” repeatedly while watching the attack unfold on television, and she did not provide further evidence for the assertion.
“He has used rhetoric to attack the peaceful transition of power. He has used rhetoric to attack his opposition. No president has ever done that before. It’s not normal and it’s not democratic,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University.
“So, when Democrats point that out, those are true facts, right?” she told ABC News.
Benesch, whose independent research team working on rhetoric that inspires violence, agreed there “is no question that the bounds of mainstream American political discourse shifted” since Trump entered politics.
“I think it is really important to recognize that he and his supporters are not the only ones who now speak in ways that normalize or even encourage violence, but he and his supporters have been doing it and are doing it much more than anybody else on the American political scene,” Benesch said.
Former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, who is now a co-host of “The View,” wrote on X that everyone has “a duty to take the temperature down” but that it was “simply dishonest for Trump [and] his allies to say his opponents shouldn’t use the very language he regularly uses: fascist, enemy within, vermin, traitors, you won’t have a country.”
The Trump campaign, in response to experts who say his own history of inflammatory rhetoric plays a large role in what’s become a heightened threat environment, told ABC News: “Only one candidate in this election has been shot at twice, and it’s not Kamala Harris.”
“The violence is coming from the political left and it’s the responsibility of Kamala Harris, as the Democrat Party nominee, to condemn the false inflammatory lie that President Trump is an alleged threat to democracy,” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “He is not, and she knows it.”
Benesch said the solution to deescalate the current atmosphere would be for leaders or influencers to convincingly condemn their own party’s language. But she expressed little confidence that would happen before the election.
“Unfortunately, nobody has a political incentive to denounce such rhetoric on their own side or in their own group, but that’s what it’s going to take,” she said. “Or such severe violence that it frightens leaders and influencers into demanding that their own supporters tone it down.”
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