This past Sunday, the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump in as many months took place as the former president played golf on a Florida green. In comparison to the previous incident, which involved shots not only being fired at the president but actually injuring him (whether directly or indirectly, we may never know due to Trump’s own obfuscations around his medical treatment), the Florida violence seems to have been more in the category of an attempt at an attempt, foiled as it was by a Secret Service agent before the perpetrator ever fired.
Because Trump was the target in both assassination attempts, their high-profile nature means they have encouraged some in the media to employ them in arguing anew that political violence in America is a “both sides” problem (it’s worth noting that the gunmen in both Trump incidents were far from left-wing or Democratic Party-aligned figures), when in reality it continues to emanate overwhelmingly from the right. A news analysis published by The New York Times shortly after the Florida assassination attempt unfortunately repeats the false “both sides” argument. Though it superficially places a share of blame on the former president for all political violence in the U.S., it badly distorts reality by shying away from assigning him fuller responsibility for legitimizing the far more prevalent existence of right-wing violence. By doing so, it helps advance the fiction that political violence is a generalized phenomenon engaged in more or less equally by both sides of the political spectrum.
Somewhat grandiosely titled “Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence,” it starts off assessing the place of political violence in modern America:
In the space of less than a week, the once and possibly future commander in chief 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. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.
Crucially, Trump is presented as both perpetrator and victim, symbolic of a larger “all sides do it” canard in which his violent language and acts have purportedly caused political adversaries to respond in kind — despite a lack of evidence in the article that his opponents have actually in any meaningful way responded with violent rhetoric or outright violence. Similarly, the “seeming inspiration” line — a reference to recent events in Springfield, Ohio — obscures Trump’s full culpability for the targeting of Haitian immigrants by a campaign of hate. In fact, both Trump and Senator’s J.D. Vance have engaged in open incitement of violence against Haitian refugees living in Springfield, a town that in the wake of remarks by the candidates has been victimized by bomb threats, violence against immigrant property, and the arrival of right-wing militia types looking to intimidate and terrorize the vulnerable newcomers. There is nothing “seeming” about the inspiration the Republican ticket has provided extremist actors who believe themselves to be acting with the blessing of the GOP’s presidential ticket. To all but the most blinkered of observers, Trump and Vance are consciously and knowingly encouraging violence, by their dehumanizing and inflammatory lies about a group of black immigrants. The fact that they have refused to stop even as the obvious damaging effects of their words have become clear to the rest of the world reveals that at best, they are comfortable with the harm that might befall vulnerable newcomers to the country.
Yet the Times asserts that, with the assassination attempts, Trump was the target of “the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era.” The suggestion here is that America is beset by violence from both sides of the political spectrum, seeing as Trump himself was targeted — but this is a deep and dangerous distortion of what is happening in our country. Though Trump and his allies have tried to blame Democrats’ statements that the former president is a “danger to democracy” for causing the shootings, this is clearly balderdash. Rather, Trump himself has acted as a one-man legitimator of right-wing political violence aimed at American society, and in particular at vulnerable groups like immigrants and minority groups, with the results visible in tragedies like the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the mass murder at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 that targeted Latinos. You simply will not find statements encouraging violence against Trump or the GOP from the vast majority of Democratic elected officials, and certainly not from the likes of President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Tim Walz. In fact, if you look at the very statements that Trump has made about the Democrats’ imaginary incitement, he doubles his offense by using those remarks to once again encourage violence against Democrats, as when he told Fox News that, “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.” Presenting the political opposition as an internal enemy “destroying the country” is heady, fascistic stuff that seeks to paint political opponents as an actual enemy to be opposed by any means necessary.
The piece goes on to note that “Mr. Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels.” But again, there is in fact no equivalence between what Trump does and what some Democrats have said; more importantly, there is no equivalence between the violence Trump has helped unleash (the assault on the U.S. Capitol being the paramount example) and what might be reasonably tied to Democrats — because the Democrats are not inciting violence in the first place! Let’s be clear: Trump and his allies have deliberately, methodically worked to create an atmosphere of political menace — including dehumanizing language, slanderous lies, and celebrations of violence — in order to cow their political opponents, target “un-American” groups like immigrants, and achieve through violence what they can’t achieve through democratic persuasion.
What’s particularly frustrating about the Times analysis is that it actually does provide plenty of evidence of Trump’s malign strategy of promoting political violence to achieve power, such as when it notes that Trump “has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed." Yet it refrains from stating outright that the obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump is consciously inciting violence and celebrating it when perpetrated by those on the right. In fact, this omission involves an additional rhetorical move (beyond the “both sides are doing it” argument) that’s particularly insidious — the introduction of the idea that Trump doesn’t actually have an intent when he uses violent rhetoric. Laughably, it opines that “Mr. Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words.” Yes, within the strict construction of the phrase “pause to reflect,” this might be true, but the fact that Trump speaks in a way that is clearly pre-meditated, conscious, and malign is at this point not subject to debate, given the countless examples of such rhetoric.
The piece goes on to note that when Trump was “[a]sked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats [in Springfield], he demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”” Here, the high-falutin’ word “demurred” does pseudo-sophisticated coverup for the obvious reality that Trump is well aware of the bomb threats, is lying about not knowing about them, and in fact is almost certainly pleased that he is creating a wild and threatening situation that he can further exploit to try to regain momentum in a race that he appears to be losing. To think otherwise is to ignore the near-decade of evidence that Trump sees himself as a strongman figure who craves chaos so that he can make his case for brutal order.
A final, grating rhetorical ploy in the Times analysis is a twist on the “both sides do it” perspective, as the piece allows that Trump may well be responsible for starting the path to violence that his opponents across the political spectrum have now allegedly joined. Yet this ends up simply slandering the political center and left in an admittedly innovative way, since, again, the underlying reality is that political violence is almost exclusively perpetrated by the right, and that it is Trump and his allies who see political violence as a conscious political strategy to subvert democratic, majoritarian politics.
Part of the trick here is that the piece’s thesis conflates political anger with political violence, which are of course two distinct things. In fact, what has been perhaps the single most noteworthy and hope-inspiring political fact about the last decade is that the anti-Trump coalition has been explicitly bound to defeating Trump at the ballot box, not with bullets and bombs. If many members of this majority coalition are angry, they are rightly so, because Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have done many awful things —among them, cultivating political violence to intimidate their political enemies. The idea that all sides of the political spectrum have been so infected by Trump’s example and countervailing hatred that even Trump’s opponents are raging out into violence is a grotesque distortion of American politics, and an absurd slam against the pro-democracy and non-violent anti-MAGA majority.