For the second time in nine weeks, former president Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt. In the latest incident, the would-be assassin, a fanatic supporter of Ukraine and bitter critic of Trump, reportedly got within 500 yards of Trump while the presidential candidate was playing golf at his West Palm Beach resort, but failed to get off a shot before the Secret Service took action.
After the July 13 attack on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he was shot in the ear and one of his supporters was murdered with two others wounded, the nation was shocked by a presidential candidate's close brush with death. Even many on the Left, including some of his Democratic opponents, at least paid lip service to the notion that this outbreak of political violence ought to lead to a lowering of the volume of harsh partisan rhetoric.
But two months later, with a different and seemingly more viable candidate in Vice President Kamala Harris leading in the polls and with their campaign of demonization of Trump in full swing, liberals seem incapable of even uttering hypocritical rhetoric about national unity.
On the contrary, the reaction to the West Palm Beach attack from Democrats and their liberal cheering section in the media seems fairly uniform. As far as they are concerned, if anyone is to blame for people trying to kill a presidential candidate, it's the victim—not those who have spent the last eight years stoking hatred against him.
It is true that Trump's willingness to engage in hyperbolic speech and wild accusations that are either exaggerated or completely untethered to the truth was a shock to the American political system. From the moment he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015, Trump has never behaved like a typical politician or used measured speech. His tendency to continuously break the accepted rules of politics earned him the admiration of tens of millions of Americans, but the ire of many opponents. They have reacted to every flight of Trumpian rhetorical fancy with not just outrage but predictions that each incident would finally be the one that breaks him, only to always be disappointed. Rather than penalize Trump, his followers discounted the gaffes and cheered him precisely because he had not pulled his punches in denouncing a D.C. establishment that has done so much damage to the country.
Trump's ability to hold on to his base and the Republican Party has only increased the outrage on the Left. When their campaign of delegitimization—beginning with the effort to falsely portray him as a Russian agent in 2016—failed, they accused him of being an authoritarian and an enemy of democracy, up to and including accusations that he is another Adolf Hitler. Those accusations continue to this day. But rather than admit that most of the criticism of Trump is as hyperbolic and as disconnected from the truth about him and his four years as president as anything he has said, liberals claim that the overheated rhetoric from the Left is Trump's fault.
Indeed, rather than take a breath and give the "enemy of democracy" rhetoric a rest after the second assassination attempt, liberal pundits insist that the usual Democratic talking points are still all true and that it is the duty of good citizens to denounce Trump in this intemperate fashion.
Nor are they prepared to hold themselves to the same standards by which they judge Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Vance was bashed for highlighting the complaints of some Springfield, Ohio, residents about Haitian immigrants. In a hostile interview, CNN's Dana Bash accused him of inciting bomb threats against schools and hospitals even though he had never called for violence.
But if Vance can be considered responsible for threats of violence against immigrants, why aren't those accusing Trump of being a second Hitler similarly held accountable for violence against him?
American society pays a high price for rhetoric that casts an election as one in which a wrong choice will bring democracy to an end. While Trump can be criticized for his over-the-top speeches, Democrats and the liberal media have gone much further. They have justified inappropriate Nazi analogies and undermined the democratic system, which is incompatible with efforts to brand one side of the political spectrum as beyond the pale. America's constitutional republic has flourished because we have a tradition of recognizing our political foes as mistaken but not as enemies. By engaging in campaigns to smear Trump and lawsuits whose purpose is to bankrupt and imprison a political foe, Democrats have crossed the line between partisan speech and banana republic tactics.
Once you go down the rabbit hole of Hitler comparisons, in particular, discussions about the legitimacy of violence not only become more prevalent; they are rendered defensible.
That is the predicament in which the Democrats' unquenchable rage at Trump has landed us. With their hopes of defeating him greater than they were in July when a diminished President Joe Biden was still their candidate, they are even more determined to highlight extreme accusations against Trump than they were after the first assassination attempt.
Simply put, blaming the intended victim of multiple murder plots for the threatened violence against him is unconscionable. And to disavow the connection between their own rhetoric and the violence it incited and to instead say it's as much Trump's fault as his unhinged opponents' is the ultimate in "both sides" arguments that liberals and Democrats would reject out-of-hand if it were Harris that was the target of assassins.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
