Republicans blame Democrats for attack on Trump

As law enforcement investigated an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, President Joe Biden called the violence “sick,” and “one of the reasons why we have to unite this country.”

But to many of Trump’s supporters, Biden and his allies were the reason for that disunity — and for the threat on the former president’s life. They demanded that Democrats retract their heated criticism of the former president, and that they tread more lightly now.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

The shooting, which injured Trump and left one rally-goer dead, stirred Republican anger at how Democrats and the left sometimes talked about their party. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who survived a 2017 mass shooting by a man who’d posted angry threats against Republicans, had previously invoked that to rebuke Republicans who blamed Trump for right-wing violence.

On Saturday night, he linked the Butler shooting to the Democrats’ campaign themes.

“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” the Louisiana congressman wrote. “Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

Other Republicans said that the shooting should convince Democrats to wind down prosecutions of the GOP nominee. Several criticized Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who had chaired the Jan. 6 Select Committee, for introducing a bill that would end Secret Service protection if recipients were convicted of felonies.

The legislation was doomed in the Republican-led House; Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that the co-sponsors “wanted this to happen.” And other Republicans said that Democrats should altogether end the cases against Trump.

“We’ve got to take the political temperature down,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said in a statement, urging Biden to “immediately order that all federal criminal charges against President Trump be dropped, and to ask the governors of New York and Georgia to do the same.”

That, explained Lee, could “help heal wounds and allow all Americans to take a deep breath and reflect on how we got here.”

Thompson, the Democratic congressman, defended his bill in a statement through a spokesperson, saying it “would not have affected the Secret Service’s presence during this tragic event” and merely “aims to clarify lines of authority when a protectee is sentenced to prison and is in the custody of another law enforcement agency. That does not apply to the former President.”

As the investigation begins into this shooting and shooter, two trends have converged.

One is the instant search for a partisan motive in political violence, which can lead nowhere. Democrats and some liberals learned that in 2011, after baselessly suggesting that the unstable man who shot Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords was motivated by her appearance on Sarah Palin’s election target map.

The other is a belief among some of Trump’s supporters that his enemies will use any means to prevent him from retaking the White House, from imprisonment to removing him from ballots to assassination. In the final hours of his own presidential campaign, Vivek Ramaswamy urged conservatives to vote for him to “save Trump,” because “the system” would try to deny him the nomination.

He urged MAGA voters to imagine the worst-case scenario – and many did. (“​​No amount of verbiage today changes the toxic national climate that led to this tragedy,” Ramaswamy wrote on Saturday.) On Saturday night, two House Republicans asked whether the Biden administration had put Trump’s life at risk, urging an investigation. Florida Rep. Michael Waltz cited “very reliable sources” who told him that Trump was denied stronger Secret Service protection by Biden’s DHS.

“If the Director of the Secret Service is making decisions based on politics and President Trump was almost killed as a result, SHE IS DONE!!!” wrote Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House physician.

Elected Democrats should expect their rhetoric to go under the blacklight. Early Saturday night, multiple Republicans pointed to the way Biden told donors that he needed to shift the post-debate discourse back to his opponent: “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye.”

At the same time, the Biden campaign was pulling down its paid media, and I was hearing about outside groups halting or delaying their own anti-Trump messaging around the Republican National Convention. The Republican ask is that Democrats stop portraying Trump as an existential threat to America.

And if they oblige, as a few have, there’s plenty of stuff on the record that’s about to be infamous. Riffs on how Biden should use his presidential immunity; comments about Trump being a martyr (Reid Hoffman is already getting grief for that); analogies that people wouldn’t have used had they known what would happen on July 13.

The most direct connection between Biden’s rhetoric and the shooting came from Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, who blamed the president outright for what happened.

“Joe Biden sent the orders,” Collins wrote on X. “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, Pa., should immediately file charges against Joe Biden for inciting an assassination.”

As in Trump’s second impeachment trial, when his defense team played clips of Democrats using violent metaphors to talk about Trump, old quotes were being mined for poorly-aging rhetoric. A spokesman for the GOP’s Senate campaign committee shared a 2019 video of Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who’d been re-elected after crossing Trump, saying that Democrats who were scared of doing so needed to “punch him in the face.” Tester had just said he was “praying for his safety” — the operative accused him of “advocating for violence against Trump.”

• In Politico, Olivia Beavers and Jordan Carney talked to Republican members of Congress who are already confident that the shooting will help Trump. “President Trump survives this attack — he just won the election,” Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) told them. “I hate to say it, but the rhetoric around him over the last few weeks, that if he wins an election, our country will end, our democracy will end, it’s the last election we’ll ever have — these things have consequences, okay?”
• “Had it been less than a half inch to the right, he would not have survived,” wrote Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. “Trump is truly blessed.”
• “They are coming after him because they want control of you,” wrote Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “They want control of your children.”
• It’s been 52 years since a presidential candidate was shot in the heat of a campaign — George Wallace, as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination in Maryland.
• In Trump’s second impeachment trial, the ex-president’s legal team played back clips of Democrats using violent metaphors or calls to “fight,” to dispute the idea Trump’s Jan. 6 speech outside the White House encouraged the violence at the Capitol.