No One Is Inciting Violence by Pointing Out the Dire Consequences of a 2nd Trump Term

On Saturday afternoon, we all learned about the attempt on former President Trump’s life—whether it was through memes about not getting your ears pierced at Claire’s or encountering the worst, vaguely homoerotic right-wing fan art of Trump you’ve ever seen on your timeline. One way or another, even as details about the gunman remain sparse (save that he was a 20-year-old white man), we’re all navigating the aftermath together, and it’s… not great!

The shooting took place at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and left one dead, and Trump with a visible, bloody cut on his ear. President Biden and top Democrats have since been quick to condemn “political violence.” But top Republicans have been just as quick to blame Democrats for the attack by framing anything anyone’s said about the existential threat that Trump’s reelection poses as an incitement of political violence.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) wrote in the hours after the shooting on Saturday night, long before any tangible details about the shooter were known. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” (It’s since been reported that the shooter was a registered Republican but donated a small amount to a Democratic action committee.) Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said point-blank that the attack on Trump was “aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

“When the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on NBC on Sunday. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also criticized Trump critics for emphasizing the stakes of reelecting Trump: “You know, if he wins, democracy is not going to end. He’s not a fascist. … The rhetoric is way too hot,” Graham said over the weekend. 

“Framing specific electoral outcomes as necessary to the survival of the country amounts to the tacit endorsement of extreme actions,” The Atlantic‘s Elliot Ackerman wrote in an essay on Sunday. “Democrats should stop framing their political opposition in such stark terms.”

In other words, Trump’s allies and even some “reasonable” centrist media voices are blaming the attempt on the former president’s life over the weekend on politicians, media outlets, and really any Trump critics who have fairly pointed out the objective threat he poses to democracy and human rights. It’s certainly a more convenient, advantageous narrative for them to push than any amount of self-reflection about the lax gun laws their party has enabled for years.

In any case, the suggestion that we can’t speak the truth about Trump out of fear that a deeply disturbed individual, empowered by our country’s awful gun laws (endorsed by Trump himself), might lash out is simply ridiculous. Trump does pose an existential threat to our democracy, and the policies he’s advocated for and the dangerous messages he’s communicated to his supporters push a chilling, fascist, and authoritarian agenda. Much of Trump’s rhetoric has directly emboldened unrepentant self-identified neo-Nazis—Trump famously tried to “both sides” the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and told white supremacist groups to “stand back and stand by” in 2020.

Lest anyone suffers from short-term memory loss, Trump has never accepted the outcome of the presidential election he lost in 2020, after he mobilized hordes of his supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the certification of the election results. Meanwhile, his closest advisers and political allies have outlined a detailed, 900-page plan, Project 2025, to ban abortion and subjugate pregnant and LGBTQ people across the country, enforcing an agenda of horrific political violence through state control of marginalized people’s bodies.

This is the truth. Stating this is not an incitement of political violence. 

Yet Republicans’ bullshit spin has largely gone unchallenged by the Biden-Harris campaign and other top Democrats. The Biden campaign announced it’s pausing some campaign events as well as all political ads against Trump. Important internal debates and conversations about replacing Biden as the likely nominee in favor of a Democrat with a clearer chance of defeating Trump have also reportedly been paused. Axios reports that some top Democrats have, at this point, conceded that Trump will win. It seems Democrats and Republicans are in agreement: Even just campaigning, or speaking to the facts of Trump’s record, is apparently inciting violence against Trump. 

The election is a little less than four months out, and if the events of the last couple weeks show us anything, it’s that political headwinds move quickly and a lot can happen in a short amount of time. Nonetheless, it’s terrifying that Trump does, indeed, continue to pose a massive, existential threat, and the political party that is our last line of defense is seemingly just accepting the right’s nonsense and refusing to fight back.