Trump pivots from second apparent assassination attempt to more incendiary claims

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — Ex-President Donald Trump responded to a second apparent assassination attempt that he blames on incendiary political rhetoric by inflaming the situation even more.

When a bullet grazed his ear in a horrific shooting that killed a rally goer in July, Trump initially acted like a changed man, telling The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito he had a chance to bring the country and the world together — although that aspiration did not last any longer than the opening paragraphs of his convention speech.

After the Secret Service thwarted a gunman who had apparently lain in wait for the ex-president at one of his Florida golf courses Sunday, Trump’s reaction was different. He accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of inviting assassins to target him when they warn that he is a threat to democracy.

He told Fox News Digital on Monday without evidence that the alleged would-be shooter “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.” Trump went on: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” he said using a familiar trope of totalitarian leaders. Trump warned that “dangerous fools” like the suspect in Sunday’s incident listen to what Democratic leaders say and react to what he has claimed, falsely, is an orchestrated attempt by the White House to use the justice system to persecute him.

Vance says that no one has tried to kill Harris

Trump’s running mate advanced an even blunter argument.

“The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance said.

“I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”

The Republican vice-presidential nominee has recently denied he is guilty of incitement after his perpetuation of baseless claims that Haitian refugees have been eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was followed by bomb threats to hospitals and schools.

Democratic Rep. Nikema Williams condemned Vance’s remarks about assassinations and the difference between liberals and conservatives.

“Would he want that? Why would you say that at a time when we’re talking about bringing down the temperature and changing the rhetoric and bringing the country together – unity – moving forward?” the Georgia Democrat said on “CNN This Morning” with Kasie Hunt. “We can disagree on policies, but we don’t want anyone to have an assassination attempt.”

Williams said it was “no secret” that she’s not a Trump supporter, but that she doesn’t want anyone to face a threat on their life. She added that she’s had to arrange personal security measures since becoming a member of Congress to protect herself and her family after facing threats.

Fierce politics already raging over Sunday’s incident

The experience of being singled out for apparent attempted murder twice in two months would weigh on anyone. Trump is also facing an election, less than 50 days away, that is a dead heat between him and the vice president, according to most polls.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that anyone who had been targeted for assassination “might be pretty sensitive, you might be pretty agitated, you might be pretty worried, so I think that is understandable.”

And seeking to decide an election by murdering a candidate for president ought to be repugnant to anyone that believes in democracy and the right of voters to choose their leaders. The exact motives of the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, are also not clear, although he was a longtime advocate for doing more to help Ukraine – a position that conflicts with Trump’s vow to end the war with Russia.

And the connection between a politician’s rhetoric and actions taken by isolated individuals is often hard to pin down even if the fear is always that a small minority of people might be motivated by a leader’s comments to provoke violence.

But Trump’s claims that Biden and Harris bear direct culpability underscore the extreme nature of his own political instincts.

His claim that their warnings about his supposed threat to democracy risk getting him killed is particularly stark. By implication, he’s saying that it is illegitimate for his opponents to point out the truth: that his past behavior — in seeking to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s voting will be corrupt — suggests that he poses a danger to America’s democratic system. His position, which looks like an attempt to stifle free speech, may also be a dark harbinger of how he would behave if he won a second term.

Trump played a similar political card at last week’s presidential debate when Harris raised his threat to terminate the Constitution and to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies. She said that since the Supreme Court and Vance wouldn’t stop Trump if he was back in the White House, “It’s up to the American people to stop him.” The vice president was clearly speaking in a political context, but Trump replied: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.”

Despite the fierce political exchanges, there was one moment that recalled lost political normality on Monday. Biden and Trump had a telephone conversation, and the president conveyed his relief that his erstwhile rival was safe. The Republican nominee said in a statement to CNN that it was “a very nice call.”

Republicans claim Democrats are guilty of incitement

Incitement and inflammatory rhetoric are often in the eye of the beholder. Republicans were angered, for instance, by Biden’s claim in August 2022 that the philosophical underpinning of the MAGA movement was like “semi-fascism.” (The charge did not become a staple of the president’s rhetoric). New York Rep. Daniel Goldman, a Democrat, said last year in an interview that Trump needed to be “eliminated” — a comment that Vance referenced on Monday. Goldman quickly apologized for his “poor choice of words” and said that he wished no harm to Trump.

But if Democrats are to blame for sometimes going over the top, Trump has made a political brand out of the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by a president or ex-president in the modern history of the United States. The scale and intensity of his invective dwarf anything that the Democrats have flung at him. He calls Harris a “fascist” in almost every public appearance — for instance, he said on August 26 in Virginia that “we have a fascist person running who’s incompetent.” He used similar rhetoric on August 23, August 17, and August 3 in campaign appearances.

Earlier this year, he claimed Biden was running a “Gestapo administration” referring to the genocidal Nazi secret police. He parroted the language of some of history’s worst tyrants by calling his political opponents “vermin” and by warning that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

And when he refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election, Trump called supporters to Washington, DC, and told them to “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Then his supporters smashed their way into the US Capitol, to try to thwart the certification of Biden’s victory. Trump has since called those arrested over the events of January 6, 2021, political prisoners and said he’d look at pardoning them if he wins back the White House in November.

Even now Trump is warning he will only accept the result of this year’s election if he deems it fair and has warned he will seek to jail officials and political opponents if he wins back power.

“He plays to people’s fear, he plays to people’s anxiety. He defines us with hate and fear,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday at a canvassing event for Harris. “This violence has to stop, but we also need to understand who and what he is and how much he is contributing to it,” she said, adding, “He has not said he’ll accept the election results.”

Social media has often helped Trump inject bile into political life. After Sunday’s incident, one of his most prominent supporters — Elon Musk, who owns X — questioned why Trump had faced two apparent assassination attempts and his rivals had not encountered any. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote in the post that he later deleted. He later argued the post had been a joke, although given America’s violent political history and assassinations of four US presidents, it’s hard to see how people might find such quips funny.

The rhetoric of Trump and his allies has also made life dangerous for others. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s former infectious diseases expert, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this year that when he is assailed, for instance, by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in congressional hearings, the pace of death threats against him rises. “(There is) a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense,” Fauci said.

Media organizations and election workers have also faced threats when on the wrong end of Trump’s baseless attacks. Prosecutors and judges need extra security while assigned to Trump cases and targeted by his daily screeds.

And even as the shocking aftermath of another apparent attempt on Trump’s life plays out, the impact of his and Vance’s rhetoric is evident in Springfield, Ohio.

After Trump amplified the false claims in the debate, Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine deployed the state highway patrol to monitor city schools that faced bomb threats. Elsewhere in Springfield, classes at Wittenberg University were held remotely Monday while campus police and local law enforcement assessed emailed threats of a bombing and a campus shooting that targeted “members of the Haitian community,” the university said.

In his interview on “State of the Union,” Vance said that any suggestion that he or Trump had acted in a way that caused such threats was “disgusting.”

It’s also disgusting that anyone would consider assassinating a former president running in a democratic election. Yet the historical record shows that while Trump has become a victim of a toxic political culture, he’s also one of its primary instigators.

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