Republicans’ blame game is intended to silence political dissent after another assassination attempt against Trump
Even though the two would-be assassins were reportedly both former supporters of Donald Trump whose subsequent politics can be best described as murky, President Trump and his supporters are now blaming the Republican nominee’s political opponents for the recent assassination attempts against him. Trump accused both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, of taking “politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred.” His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, claimed that the two attempts on Trump’s life compared with none on Harris’ is “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”
“Somebody’s going to get hurt by it, and it’s going to destroy this country”, Vance warned.
Perhaps an even more powerful Trump supporter, billionaire Elon Musk, similarly wondered in a since-deleted tweet why “no one is even trying to assassinate” Harris.
Significantly, Republicans have offered no specific examples of violent rhetoric from Harris or any of her mainstream supporters, grasping instead to conflate campaign language with incendiary speech.
By contrast, experts who spoke to Salon saw an ominous precedent in Trump’s words — namely, an attempt to intimidate political dissenters by linking them to violence against state leaders.
Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of “A Brief History of Fascist Lies”, told Salon that the criticisms of Trump and his supporters reflect a “kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn’t connect to reality.” Finchelstein specifically pointed to “the idea that the person that has promoted violence through rhetoric, and even sometimes the glorification of that violence, the idea that that person can complain about the ‘rhetorical violence’ of his enemies. It’s shocking.”
When asked about political leaders who have engaged in similar tactics, Finchelstein observed that Trump “does this kind of thing again and again, and that’s why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler.
