Trump's Shooting Should Not Silence Warnings About His Threat to Democracy
Julie Hollar
Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become "America's Hitler"—Reuters, 7/15/24.)
“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”
Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country's top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of "political violence."
'Unthinkably uncivil'
The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump's exhortation to "remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness" as a call for "national unity."
In an editorial headlined, "Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light," the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to "cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction."
The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for "unthinkably uncivil" actions and "physical violence." They pointed to protesters who "harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes," universities that have "become battlegrounds," and the "bipartisan hazard" of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi's husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.
(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices' houses as "totalitarian," and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).
New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting "Antithetical to America" (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. "Violence is antithetical to democracy," the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that "violence is infecting and inflecting American political life." They explained:
Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.
It's a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.
'Leaders of both parties'
Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that "the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right." It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by "right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists." While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,
the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.
But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:
It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.
Of course, there's a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.
The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump's incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: "If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.
That's why it's critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.
'Grossly irresponsible talk'
The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.
Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.
We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”
Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: "There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism."
Research Assistance: Alefiya Presswala
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