Originally published at Project-Syndicate | Jul 15th, 2024
As ugly as it may sound, the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump is somewhat normal, in the sense that it is consistent with a widespread pattern of recourse to brute force in American life. And a constant feature of American political violence is the vicious rhetorical battle that follows every incident.
WASHINGTON, DC – Europe is no stranger to political violence like the recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. More than 50 candidates and activists were physically assaulted during France’s recent parliamentary election – a painful reminder of a not-so-distant past when violence was part of the language of political discourse in several European countries.
But political violence in the United States is different, because it occurs in a society where civilians own more than 300 million firearms and mass shootings are tragically frequent. As ugly as it may sound, the attempt to assassinate Trump is somewhat normal, in the sense that it is consistent with a widespread pattern of recourse to brute force in American life.
Political violence in the US takes on ever-changing forms, but a constant feature is the vicious rhetorical battle that follows every incident. Each side passionately blames the other for inciting the shooter with inflammatory statements, suggesting that the victim’s political opponents bear moral responsibility for the violence.
This is a rare area of bipartisan consensus among US politicians: the victim’s political party determines the culprit, but the narrative’s structure is always the same. The time frame for dispassionately condemning violence shortens with each episode.
The attempt on Trump’s life, which resulted in the death of one rally attendee and the 20-year-old shooter, had two immediate effects. First, it revitalized the martyrdom narrative of Trump’s “MAGA” campaign, and followers instantly began producing merchandise glorifying the surviving hero, who declared he would remain “defiant in the face of wickedness.” Trump’s prophetic tone in crediting God for “preventing the unthinkable from happening” fits perfectly with the MAGA narrative of a divinely-appointed messenger whom the world wants to kill.
The second, equally predictable effect is the accusation that Democrats are to blame for the attack. Senator J.D. Vance, a leading candidate to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick, argued that the incident was a direct consequence of President Joe Biden’s campaign portraying Trump as a threat to democracy, thus legitimizing attempts to remove him by force. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance claimed.
Similarly, US Representative Mike Collins suggested that the District Attorney’s Office in Butler County, Pennsylvania, “should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” Even Representative Steve Scalise, a victim of a 2017 attack by a left-wing extremist that the FBI classified as domestic terrorism, pointed to the Democrats’ “incendiary rhetoric.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign circulated clips of Democratic Representative Dan Goldman saying on live television that Trump needs to be “eliminated,” a statement echoed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And his operatives highlighted a now-ominous-sounding quote from a frustrated Biden, who, after his recent disastrous debate performance, said, “we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Democrats and their supporters have been hastily condemning the incident, while reminding everyone that Trump openly incited a mob to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 – the most horrific episode of political violence in recent American history – with the aim of overturning his loss in the 2020 election.
This rhetorical skirmish is likely to solidify Trump’s lead over Biden in the polls, but the long-term implications are more devastating: a national conversation fueled by hatred, victimhood, and resentment. In 2011, after the assassination attempt on Representative Gabby Giffords in Arizona, a Democratic-leaning news outlet popularized the term “stochastic terrorism,” which refers to political violence by lone actors motivated by a radicalizing atmosphere. The stochastic terrorist was supposedly Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and then Tea Party leader, who had circulated a map marking congressional districts to be targeted in the next elections, including Giffords’ district, with what looked like crosshairs.
It later emerged that Giffords’ attacker was a deeply disturbed individual with no knowledge of Palin’s map, rallies, or political debate. Despite this, and despite the lack of evidence of a causal link between political rhetoric and such attacks, the term resurfaces after every attack and has entered specialized literature as if it described a valid concept.
Through shared tactics of manipulation, instrumentalization, and self-victimization, Democrats and Republicans have become trapped in a mire of circular reasoning that is as perverse as it is dangerous. Alleging a connection between violence and political rhetoric becomes a rhetorical weapon itself, fueling the extreme polarization that makes political violence more likely.
Mattia Ferraresi: Is Managing Editor of the Italian newspaper Domani and a 2019 Harvard Nieman Fellow. He is the author of several books, including the first volume on Donald Trump to be published in Italy and the forthcoming I demoni della mente (The Demons of the Mind) (Mondadori, 2024).