Violence? It’s the Other Guys
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 19, 2024
So now in Donald Trump’s world, it’s Joe Biden who’s responsible for the would-be assassin, along with that woman whose name he keeps forgetting is his actual opponent. I’m glad we finally got that cleared up.
In Trump-speak, it is Biden and Kamala Harris who are threats to democracy and not him, for replacing Biden. In his telling, every time they call out Trump’s resistance to accepting election results and promising to challenge results he doesn’t like, they apparently are appealing to every nutjob with a gun to target him.
Plus, he is claiming divine intervention to save him from violent harm — a note being picked up at Republican rallies for a “savior” presidential candidate.
His vice-presidential sidekick, JD Vance, has added, “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — 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.” Vance wants Democrats to stop calling Trump a “fascist,” though that’s a term he uses interchangeably with “Marxist” about Harris. It’s nuts.
There was no evidence that the shooters in the Butler, Pa. attack on Trump was grounded in political partisanship, and the suspect arrested in this week’s failed attempt has been connected to a variety of odd political and criminal activities that included a desire to fight in Ukraine. But no one in law enforcement is saying that either was motivated by liberal-conservative splits.
Amid questions about presidential security in a time of ever-expansive open-carry gun laws, the focus is once again on violence, threats of violence and, naturally, who’s threats of violence are the loudest and far-reaching. Today’s homily concerns the plentiful crossover from misinformation and conspiracy theories into the need for scapegoats and threats of violence.
The Misinformation Machines
In the past days, it has been Vance who set up the ugliness over “childless cat ladies” and unsubstantiated claims about immigrants eating pets, all in the name of highlighting opposition to how Trump-Vance want us to see administration immigration policy. That left it to Trump to amplify and double down on excessive Haitian immigrant growth — all legal — in Springfield, Ohio and other towns that he intends to erase with mass deportations.
What has followed have been waves of bomb threats against city hall, hospitals and schools — over nothing, since city officials, the governor, and community officials say there is no evidence of pet-eating going on by immigrants or anyone else.
Vance made clear that it is perfectly fine for him to “create” stories that help focus on real citizen criticism about living in a place with rapid immigrant growth.
By contrast, no one had to make up Trump inviting an infamous conspiracy theorist who thinks 9/11 an “inside job” on his campaign plane for the last few weeks, or his associations with Holocaust deniers, or his promises to prosecute or undercut political opponents and news networks for the crime of failing to agree with him.
True, Harris has used ridicule and belittling tactics in her speeches to recognize Trump as a mere political mortal, but she seems to take pains to produce a Trump policy as evidence for each of her pointed remarks, whether about the effects of tax cuts or the mismanagement of the Covid crisis.
It is easy to find examples in which both candidates stretch the truth for evidence, but it is Trump by far who simply discards it, often replacing policy with slogans and reason for threats. In any event, all their records face public scrutiny, and little about them should merit threats of violence.
Whatever the increase in coarse language, what seems to matter is that each side thinks the other side is the one responsible for worsening our politics. It’s not clear that “toning down” the language will translate into non-violence.
All this is about statements presumably of our own making, while noting the announcement of criminal charges from the Justice Department against Russian sources, among other foreign countries, paying right-wing broadcasters to echo Russian talking points towards upsetting and influencing our elections.
Choosing to Believe
The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote that Trump “was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era,” but there is no national commitment to reducing violence. Breitbart headlined remarks by Hillary Clinton labeling Trump a danger to the country as evidence of liberal “demonization.”
The Times’ columnist Jamelle Bouie noted that for Trump, shutting Springfield for bomb threats seems confirmation that the fate of people is worth less than the symbolism he wants to associate with immigration chaos.
Violence, threat of violence or the belief that a political side has been threatened apparently all have arrived as political staples.
The Washington Post had a piece this week about the fantastic reach of Trump misstatements of truth, about the degree to which MAGA supporters have come to believe that, as with authoritarian past, that repeating a lie helps cement it as truth.
The news outlet listed a series of false statements for which a post-debate YouGov poll found remarkable degree of agreement among Trump supporters. Among them: Immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield (52%); It is legal to kill babies after birth (43%); Public schools are providing students with sex-change operations (28%); Venezuela is deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions to the US (81%); The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than all of Europe (77%); Inflation is at its highest point ever (70%).
Those identifying as Democrats and independents rejected all those false assertions.
If you don’t want to believe that the mob attacks on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, injured or killed anyone, or that it was an attack on democratic processes, apparently you won’t recognize when misinformation crosses over into violence territory. If you accept that it is advisable to rewrite even recent history for political advantage, you’ll have no problem ignoring its factual or moral lessons.
If you think that Democrats’ political language is more a problem than the availability of guns and a lack of mental health services, you’ll likely think that Trump has a point.
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