Everybody in American politics should dial down the vitriolic rhetoric, very much including the rhetoric blaming the other side’s rhetoric for causing specific acts of violence.
Oh — and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, in particular, needs an infusion of decency because his blows below the belt are both legion and inexcusable.
Finally, let’s be a little clearer about what is and isn’t a political cheap shot. A strongly negative appraisal of an opponent’s positions or the possible results thereof isn’t necessarily out of bounds. What should indeed be out of bounds is personal invective, wild charges of Nazism or communism or comparison to mass murderers Hitler and Stalin, or significant falsehoods that are willful or reckless.
Both sides commit major rhetorical transgressions that generically can fuel fires of violence. Yet neither side is collectively guilty for specific acts of violence or attempted violence by mentally disturbed loners. There is no collective “they” responsible for the two awful assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump, nor for the nearly successful one in 2017 against now-House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), nor for the separate assaults that nearly killed both Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), in 2022 and 2011, respectively.
Indeed, it is wildly and grossly irresponsible to blame one side for such violence without good evidence, and doubly so when one excuses or deliberately ignores rhetoric from one’s own side that is equally objectionable to the other side’s malicious language. Raising the vitriolic temperature in general can be much more culpable for a widespread cultural tendency toward violence than an individual rhetorical excess can be culpable for an act of directed violence by a loner.
OK, that’s a lot of ground to cover, with almost every individual assertion above probably meriting its own more searching essay. For current purposes, let’s zip through some examples that partially illustrate the general idea that a recalibration of rhetorical norms is necessary.
Start with Vance, as an exemplar of the larger problem. This isn’t about him insulting childless women or him “creating memes” about cat-eating Haitians while acknowledging he had no idea if the meme was true or even about him lying that U.S. military assistance is paying for Ukrainian pleasure yachts. In the last two weeks, he has said at least two things even worse, absolutely slanderous in the vernacular sense if not in the legal sense.
Asked about former Vice President Mike Pence refusing to implement Trump’s plan to stop the electoral vote count, Vance said Pence’s motives had nothing to do with constitutional beliefs: “In reality, if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.” That’s flat-out vile.
And when center-right columnist David Frum posted harsh but specific criticisms of the Trump-Vance ticket (one of which was ill-advised, in my book), Vance went low in calumnious fashion: “I’d say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice.”
To associate a random writer with an attempted assassination is lower than vile. To remind everybody of what we know of the two would-be assassins: The first, whose shot thankfully missed killing Trump by less than an inch, had no discernable ideological motive. A bullied and disaffected gun enthusiast, he apparently just wanted to kill a president — any president. His digital footprint showed that he had been casing the campaign schedules of both Trump and President Joe Biden, obviously looking to see which one would come into his vicinity soonest.
As for the second would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, he was a long-known oddball who voted for Trump in 2016 and detested Biden but became obsessed, variously, with foreign policies regarding Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine-Russia. His animus against Trump sprung from those foreign policy obsessions, with not a sliver of indication that he was spurred to action by Democratic claims that Trump is a “threat to democracy” or any other prominent Democratic rhetoric.
It should go without saying that it is essentially defamatory for Vance to tie Frum to the assassination attempts, and it is also dead wrong, indeed counterfactual, to try to blame the “Left” in general for either attempt.
Likewise, it was wrong for the Left and its dishonest media mouthpieces to blame former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin for the attempted assassination of Giffords in 2011. It was wrong for leftists to blame conservatives for the loon who tried to kill Paul Pelosi — and wrong, by the way, for Trump repeatedly to make fun of the attempt. It is wrong to blame conservatives for mass shootings, often committed by lunatics who, to the extent their ideology is known, actually tend leftward.
Everybody should stop the blame game. Now.
Meanwhile, both the standards and the double standards of both sides need reworking. Both sides over-emit vaporous complaints about the other for relatively ordinary discourse while excusing their own worse examples. Spare us, for example, the conservative weeping about those mean old Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy. What if they really believe it? Why is it out of bounds to say so? If Trump wants to avoid being thusly accused, perhaps he shouldn’t spend months trying to overturn a valid election and exhorting his followers to block an official ceremony. Perhaps he shouldn’t say, even jokingly, that he wants to be a dictator for a day without ever walking it back or even retroactively clarifying that it was a joke. Perhaps he shouldn’t repeatedly threaten to have his perceived political enemies, by name, arrested or surround himself with people who list even Trump’s own former Cabinet members as criminal targets. Why is it out of bounds in a democracy for people to use an opponent’s own words and actions to warn that he may undermine democracy?
Likewise, what if conservatives truly believe that the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would undermine the constitutional republic by combining disregard for the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the separation of powers, and parental rights, all while using a politically weaponized Justice Department, and more? Why would it be off limits for conservatives to say so?
Equating an opponent to a mass murderer such as Hitler or Stalin, though, is inarguably inexcusable, as is accusing the opponent of Nazism or communism in general — and, unless used with care, the substantively lesser accusations of “fascism” or “Marxism,” although at least possibly defensible, clearly border on low blows.
None of this should need explaining because common decency obviously excludes the equation of even an unusually detestable opponent with mass murderers without the slightest evidence of actual murderousness.
It is an incontrovertible fact that for decades the Left has readily and repeatedly equated conservatives with Hitlerism, and the leftist Biden White House and its allies are horribly guilty of doing so to Trump, again and again. Conservatives are right not just to cry foul on this but to yell it from the rooftops.
Alas, Trump’s fans don’t even come close to holding their own hero to the same standard, even when ludicrously blaming the assassination attempts on the Left’s “Hitler” language about Trump. (See above.) I eagerly hope somebody can show me otherwise, but I challenge anyone to find a single example of a writer or pundit who blamed the Left’s Hitler rhetoric while also offering even a peep of criticism for Trump doing the same.
Indeed, Trump so regularly calls his opponents Nazis or “Gestapo” or communists that the number is almost impossible to count. Where was the outrage on the Right as recently as Sept. 12, when Trump combined all the blood libels into one? Yes, this very month he warned against “Comrade Kamala Harris. … She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist. She’s not actually a socialist because she’s gone past that. … They skipped past socialism and started at communism.”
Yet somehow it is the Left’s rhetoric that is responsible for the assassination attempt three days later by a man whose primary motivation seems to have been the Russian crimes against Ukraine.
Spare us the flagrantly dishonest crocodile tears.
It is a horrific fact that every American president is the subject of assassination plots. Former President Barack Obama was subject to at least 11 of them. Yet of course it would have been unfair for liberals to blame conservatives when a mentally ill man fired numerous rounds into the White House itself, or when people at several different times tried to poison Obama with ricin, or when several avowedly right-wing groups were caught plotting to kill him.
Nobody, repeat nobody, bears collective guilt for these actions.
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All sides, though, bear collective guilt for creating such a divisive and charged atmosphere that frighteningly large minorities on both sides believe political violence in the U.S. can be justified if things don’t go their way.
Both sides should be more responsible. And on both offense and defense, both sides should show more forbearance.