MAGA World’s Reckless Point-Scoring

Some prominent Republicans tried immediately to blame Democrats for the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. Such charges are cynical attempts to immunize Trump from any further criticism.

But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Irresponsible Speculation

Within hours of the attempt on Trump’s life on Saturday, RealClearPolitics, a right-leaning news and commentary site, noted the name of the shooter and added that his “online profile suggests that [he] was a leftist radical.” It did not provide evidence to back up this claim. The website later removed that sentence without acknowledging the deletion, but not fast enough to stop that line from spreading over onto social media.

So far, it seems that Trump’s would-be assassin had no significant online presence beyond a Discord account that had not been used in months, according to the platform. The FBI said that its agents have obtained the gunman’s phone, but so far they have not identified a motive for the shooting.

I do not know why RCP leapt to its conclusion about the gunman’s ideology. (RealClearPolitics did not respond to a request for an explanation of the silent change.) Speculating at a time like this is a natural temptation—but it’s also wildly irresponsible to do so publicly. What we do know is that the attacker was male, young, and white and, according to reporters at several outlets who have interviewed his acquaintances, also apparently intelligent and reportedly something of a social outcast, a profile similar to some other mass shooters. He was a registered Republican, which might not mean anything.

I don’t know what his politics were. Neither does anyone else in the general public. Newspapers and websites could have run headlines that said “Registered Republican Shoots Republican Candidate at Republican Rally in Heavily Republican Area” and it would have been accurate—in fact, it is completely true. Wisely, publications did not do that, because so far, none of this information, despite being factually correct, seems relevant to the attack.

So much uncertainty, of course, did not stop people across the political spectrum from making wild accusations about the shooter, but some Republican leaders went the extra distance to try to gain an instant political advantage from the mayhem. Instead of heeding the calls of more responsible Americans to help turn down the national temperature at a horrifying moment, they dialed it up to thermonuclear.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, for example, complained that “Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy.” (For the sake of accuracy, I should note that Democrats and others have said this because Trump and some of his conservative enablers are threats to democracy.) “Their inflammatory rhetoric,” Scott added, “puts lives at risk.”

In fairness to Senator Scott, he’s right that political rhetoric can provoke violence. Cesar Sayoc, for example, is now in a federal prison for mailing bombs to prominent liberals; his defense attorneys claimed that Sayoc is an unstable person who was influenced by his “religious” viewing of Fox News programs such as Fox & Friends and Hannity, along with his immersion in Facebook groups and social media.

Troubled people will do unhinged things, and that should not be an excuse for limiting the ability of American citizens to engage in full-throated criticism of public figures. But some prominent Republicans—people in elected office who have a responsibility as leaders to show at least some restraint—have tried to link a terrible moment of violence to the political views of their foes without any evidence or detailed information, all for the sake of lazy and irresponsible point-scoring.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida made one of the worst such accusations, calling the shooting “an assassination attempt by a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.” Former Attorney General William Barr chimed in, demanding that Democrats “stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy. He is not.” Barr, of course, is one of the people who knows firsthand how dangerous a Trump presidency would be, because he himself told us so. In testimony to the House January 6 committee, Barr described Trump as “detached from reality,” and he has called Trump’s thinking, “when left to his own devices,” a “horror show.” If Barr thinks these revelations should not lead us to conclude that Trump is an “existential threat,” I suppose he’s free to parse his own words.

And then comes Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, unveiled this afternoon as the winner of Trump’s weeks-long The Apprentice: Extreme Sycophancy Edition and now the GOP vice-presidential nominee. Vance tied President Joe Biden’s campaign directly to the shooting: “Today is not just some isolated incident,” he posted only a few hours after it happened. “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.”

Vance apparently didn’t think that such language was dangerous when he called Trump “cultural heroin” in an essay for this magazine in 2016, among other pointed criticisms Vance felt free to make before he ran for office. But the spectacle of ambition overpowering decency has been the most prominent feature of Vance’s short political career.

Former Trump Cabinet member Ben Carson was among those who resorted to the use of the nebulous they in making his accusations. “They tried to bankrupt him,” he posted shortly after the event. “They tried to slander him. They tried to imprison him. Now they have tried to kill him, but if God is protecting him, they will never succeed.”

Representative Mike Collins of Georgia, however, left no doubt who he blamed. Within minutes of the shooting, he posted: “Joe Biden sent the orders.”

These GOP partisans know exactly what they’re doing. They have always known that Trump himself is the source of much of the most violent rhetoric in modern American life. The former president’s speeches are a mad swirl of paranoia and rage at everyone who isn’t in his camp, and a constant source of embarrassment for supporters, especially elected political leaders in the Republican establishment, who want to portray him as a statesman. For these Trump allies, the attempt on the former president’s life was an opportunity to put Trump critics (including some in the media) on the defensive and to immunize Trump from any further condemnations of his own ghastly statements.

As Ed Luce of the Financial Times put it on social media yesterday, this behavior is nothing less than “an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop [Trump] from regaining power.”

And it seems to be working. This morning, MSNBC canceled today’s edition of Morning Joe, a decision that one unnamed source explained to CNN was made “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” (As the NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen noted, MSNBC’s decision “brings further dimension to the trust-in-media problem: we don’t trust ourselves.”)

Today, The New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury sent a note to readers after outrage from Trump supporters about the Sunday insert in the print edition of the paper calling Trump unfit for office. “There is no connection between our prior decision to run this editorial package in print and Saturday’s incident,” Kingsbury explained, adding, “We would have changed our plans if we could have.” More to the point: The Trump editorial was already online two days before the shooting. The Times is now on its back foot about something it had already published.

Fortunately, more reasonable people are making the utterly sensible point that you can accurately call Donald Trump a menace to democracy and affirm that he is a reprehensible person while also condemning any violence in politics. My colleague David Frum was among the most eloquent of these voices:

Trump’s behavior in the public square continues to merit withering denunciation. Criticizing him in the starkest terms is not wishing him personal harm, and those who assert otherwise are engaging in a cheap attempt to silence the just accusations of Americans who are genuinely concerned about Trump’s dark vision for their country.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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