High-profile Republicans have immediately blamed Donald Trump’s near-assassination on Democrats calling him a threat to democracy.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday that “when the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the republic would end, it heats up the environment.”
Other Republicans were more explicit. Shortly after the shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said on social media that President Joe Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” while Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said in his own social media post, “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
As of Sunday afternoon, the motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old man who tried to shoot Trump, remain unknown. But it’s clear Republicans want to shut down Biden’s core campaign message. Biden has repeatedly called Trump a threat to democracy, citing, among other things, his encouragement of mob rioters who attacked Congress as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (During their debate last month, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the coming election if he lost.)
“The choice in this election is simple,” Biden said in June. “Donald Trump will destroy our democracy. I will defend it.”
In a TV ad that Biden’s campaign released earlier this month, a narrator warned that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Trump can’t be prosecuted for “official acts” done during his presidency would allow him to rule like a king if he wins a second term.
“He’s already led an insurrection and threatened to be a dictator on day one,” the narrator said. “Donald Trump can never hold this office again.”
After Saturday’s shooting, the Biden campaign paused its ads and events, though it didn’t offer a public rationale for the pause. A spokesperson for the campaign declined to elaborate on Sunday. Biden has called the shooting “sick” and echoed lawmakers of both parties who’ve decried political violence.
Trump and Republicans, meanwhile, have for the past year described Biden as a banana republic dictator who has “weaponized” the government against his political opponents, all because the Justice Department has been pursuing criminal cases against Trump related to his 2020 election schemes and his hoarding of classified documents after leaving the White House.
“He’s been weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant,” Trump said at a rally in December. “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
Republicans have claimed Biden orchestrated the New York City criminal case against Trump and even made an outlandish accusation that the Justice Department had a plan to assassinate Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
In an email just last week, the Trump campaign used the exact wording Republicans are now decrying in the wake of the assassination attempt: “Biden is a threat to democracy.”
On Sunday, Johnson condemned Biden’s “threat to democracy” rhetoric but also suggested that both Biden and Trump should tone down their language.
“We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down. We’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country,” Johnson said. “We need leaders of all parties, on both sides, to call that out and make sure that happens so that we can go forward and maintain our free society that we all are blessed to have.”
