🇺🇸 Murder Attempts in a Media Vacuum?
The second attempt on Trump's life raises questions, again, about linkages between the Democrats' political rhetoric and motives of would-be assassins
Not even the presumed target seems particularly surprised.
“It was quite an interesting day!” Trump commented on Truth Social.
Perhaps it’s about the circumstances.
The man lurking around Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach (Florida) for twelve hours, equipped with an AK-47 and a GoPro camera, never fired a shot. Instead, the Secret Service opened fire upon seeing an automatic rifle sticking out from underneath the bushes. Reportedly, the suspect had not yet spotted Trump.
Maybe it is that when history repeats itself—less as tragedy and more as farce—it becomes interesting to report on.
This was the second time in sixty-two days that an unknown man with an automatic rifle got close to the presidential candidate. That first time, Trump was hit. And this second time, he wasn’t. Based on what we know so far about the suspect, his presence appears connected to a planned assassination attempt on the presidential candidate.
Yet the relative calm with which this piece of news is received — seemingly independent of the recipient's political sympathies — is indicative. We are by now well aware of the risk of an assassination. And shrug it off.
But the incident highlights, again, the question of links between violent rhetoric and violent actions.
Trump has already made a bid at connecting the dots between the motives of his political opponents and those of the would-be assassin.
“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,” Trump told Fox, and continued:
“They do it with a combination of rhetoric and lawsuits they wrap me up in.… These are the things that dangerous fools, like the shooter, listen to—that is the rhetoric they listen to, and the same with the first one.”
Critics find his statements ironic, given Trump’s own rhetoric. That it is often inflammatory, a point which nearly innumerable columns have been dedicated to describing during the past nine years. In this case, however, it’s more interesting to examine the substance behind Trump’s claim.
Whether there is a link between the rhetoric of the Democrats and the suspect’s motives and actions is impossible to say, or at least too early.
Based on the information that U.S. authorities have provided thus far, the suspect appears to be a madman. In a self-published book, he writes that Iran, and possibly also the reader, should feel “free to kill Trump.” After voting for Trump in 2016, he expressed regret, saying he must be held responsible for the fact that the “child that we elected for our next president ended up being brainless.” On the truck outside his home, where the police recently conducted a search, there was a Biden/Harris sticker.
What is clear is that the suspect’s actions did not take place in a vacuum.
President Biden said after the incident that "there is no place for political violence or any violence in our country." He expressed similar sentiments after the first assassination attempt on Trump earlier this summer.
However, the president soon returned to his previous descriptions of his opponent. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, he repeated false claims about how and why Trump used phrases like “bloodbath” and “very fine people on both sides”.
Kamala Harris continued, along the same lines, during last week's presidential debate, where she falsely described Trump as having called Nazis “fine people” and held him personally responsible for “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” (referring to January 6th and the storming of the Capitol).
Earlier this summer, Harris declared that “Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms.” Days prior to the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye.” And on the day before the attempt, Biden called Trump as “a threat to this nation.”
“One day before the assassination attempt Biden called Trump a threat to this nation”
Democrats, interviewed on air, regularly compare Trump to fascists and Hitler. News magazines have made similar comparisons.
What’s the difference between lies and exaggerations expressed by Biden/Harris and those by Trump?
In my view, the difference lies in what the two political parties claim to be — where the Democrats now combine manipulative rhetoric with a self-image of representing the grown-ups in the room. Unlike their populist opponents, establishment representatives are expected to neither exaggerate nor to mislead. Their words appear to carry the weight of truth, not that of emotive hot air.
This not only affects what the establishment thinks and feels (or how it navigates what is appropriate to think and feel) — but also, of course, the lost and potentially dangerous souls.
Harris claims to believe that democracy is now under threat. Precisely the same message was echoed by the suspect on the golf course.
Trump’s words: “These are the things that dangerous fools, like the shooter, listen to.”
For many, it is a strange reasoning that dangerous rhetoric from the left could pose a threat to democracy.
On MSNBC, polarizing rhetoric is equated with right-wing rhetoric. After reports that a man had waited for Trump armed with an automatic rifle, the question posed by host Alex Witt was whether the Trump campaign intended to tone down its rhetoric.
New York Times chief correspondent Peter Baker sees a potential connection between the “eating dog and cat” remark in the debate and the actions of the suspect.
The issue of Republican rhetoric is not unimportant, but it is symptomatic of how much of the news media views political threats. That political violence is synonymous with right-wing violence.
Elon Musk quipped in response to a user’s question on X (“Why do they want to kill Donald Trump?”), pondering: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔.”
A potentially inflammatory remark that was quickly deleted. But the question remains: Why is it Trump who faces assassination attempts?
There are as of the moment no definitive answers to these questions. Perhaps it's due to coincidences. That Harris or Biden have not been targeted doesn’t mean there’s no risk of political violence against them. Perhaps it’s because Trump's Secret Service protection is weaker than, for example, Harris’s (a sitting president or vice president has stronger Secret Service protection than former presidents and vice presidents, a principle that Republicans in Congress argue penalizes Trump — who, they underline, faces the greatest threat of any politician in the country). Perhaps, as Democrats and several news outlets have suggested, it’s due to Trump's own polarizing rhetoric. If that’s the case, then it is a causality that could be hurled at all political actors who make claims about existential threats.