Rhetoric Angle in Trump Shooting Has Echoes of Rabin, JFK Assassinations

In absence of evidence, accusations are risky

Trump says “I’m the only thing standing in the way of the complete destruction of America.”

After an assassination attempt, there’s almost invariably an effort to blame the shooting on political rhetoric.

When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed in 1995, the Israel right was blamed for its rhetoric harshly critical of Rabin. Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2022 book Bibi: My Story goes on at length to defend Netanyahu from the accusation that he or the Israeli right more broadly were guilty. Reviewing the book for the Algemeiner, I wrote that “while Netanyahu does own up to some tactical and political errors, I wish he’d have been a little less defensive, and a little more reflective, when it came to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.”

After a Democratic member of Congress from Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in 2011, a New York Times editorial contended that the attacker was “part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery.” It went on, “It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” A subsequent Times editorial that erroneously blamed Governor Sarah Palin for fueling the attack on Giffords was the subject of a Times correction and a lawsuit against the Times by Palin.

Saturday’s shooting of President Trump puts some of the Democrats’ language, retrospectively, in poor light. I’ve been writing about this some over the past few weeks.

Here is a July 2 item about Jill Biden:

​​Jill Biden has a cover interview in Vogue: “We know what’s at stake. Joe is asking the American people to come together to draw a line in the sand against all this vitriol….this anger and animosity and divisiveness…it’s not who we are.”

The Vogue writer, Maya Singer, goes on, “And on the other side? Pick your poison. Christian nationalist, nativist, racist, misogynist, queerphobic, neofascist, techno-authoritarian—they boil down to the same idea, which is that some group or other ought to dominate everyone else.”

This is pretty funny: It’s Biden who’s against vitriol, animosity and divisiveness but the sympathetic profile writer manages to paint all the non-Biden voters as a bunch of neofascists? Maybe Singer wasn’t listening to the first lady carefully enough about the animosity and divisiveness? Or maybe she was listening a little too attentively, and credulously, when Jill Biden said, “our democracy is on the line in this election.” Denounce divisiveness all you want, when you say a vote for your political opponent is a vote against democracy, people might have difficulty following the logic, or at least wonder about the consistency.

Here’s a July 9 item, after noting MIT professor Daron Acemoglu’s claim that “Trump is a veritable menace to democracy”:

If Professor Acemoglu is taken with the urgency of defeating Trump, he has plenty of company. 

The chairman of the Washington State Democratic Party, Shasti Conrad, issued a statement saying, “over the last week we’ve seen grassroots organizers, labor, and community leaders unite to show their support for a Biden-Harris ticket – because we know this is how we defeat fascism and continue to build a movement for working families, small businesses, and safer communities.” 

“Defeat fascism” sure is emphatic language.

Meanwhile, Biden himself sent a long letter to Democrats that concluded, “We have one job. And that is to beat Donald Trump….Any weakening or resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It is time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.” 

That’s the closing of the letter—not “make America Great Again” or advance freedom or restore the soul of America but “defeat Donald Trump.” The main motivating rationale of the campaign seems to be a negative, preventative one: saving America from Trump.

It reminds me of Nixon’s farewell speech: “always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” The Democrats, with their hate of Trump, are veering toward self-destruction. That’s not the only thing happening, but it’s part of the dynamic.

Even tonight, at 8 pm, after the assassination attempt, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat of Queens, issued a tweet describing a second Trump term as “fascism.” Guess she didn’t get the memo about toning down the anti-Trump rhetoric.

Back in January, 2024, when the New York Times published an interview with Andreas Malm, the author of the 2021 book "How To Blow Up a Pipeline," I wrote about it under the headline “Left Threatens Violence If Trump Wins.”

Trump himself, meanwhile, has offered mixed signals. His platform promises to “Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.” Yet texts from Trump’s campaign direct recipients to a campaign donation page with language that says, “I am Donald Trump, and I will be accepting your nomination for president on July 18th! If you remember one thing, remember this: I’m the only thing standing in the way of the complete destruction of America…”

Trump tells Salena Zito of The Washington Examiner that he’s rewritten his convention speech from one largely criticizing Biden to one seizing the opportunity “to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. 

Politicians and activists should be careful about overheated rhetoric. And, until more is known about the person who shot Trump, it’s too early to draw an evidence-based connection between the rhetoric and the shooter. 

Such leaps are risky. In the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination,  some Democrats blamed his bitter conservative critics. But the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was no conservative but an avowed Marxist who had spent 32 months in the Soviet Union and tried to go to communist-controlled Cuba. 

Call me old-fashioned, but my main concern about all this talk is less that it will incite violence and more that it’s just not true. It may be hard to tell for sure unless you run the full experiment—if Trump loses the election and it doesn’t cause “the complete destruction of America,” or if Trump wins and it doesn’t result in “fascism” or the end of democracy. Those catastrophes seem to me like low-probability outcomes. Yet the campaigns are presenting them as if they are sure things, guaranteed consequences if the other guy wins.

Ideally, offering some reasonable skepticism about apocalyptic claims by candidates would be the work of independent journalists. There’s no guarantee it’d help prevent assassination attempts. It might, at least, translate to a better-informed electorate. 

The Secret Service: In a 2012 column for Reason, “The Biggest Secret Service Failure of All Time,” I wrote, “Congress may want to think about redistributing the responsibility for presidential protection to a different agency.” 

In a 2014 item about the Secret Service budget, I wrote, “If the $1.8 billion a year were devoted just to protecting President Obama, the agency could hire 1,800 bodyguards, pay them each $1 million a year, and tell them to make sure no one gets anywhere near the president. ….It's quite possible that Congress will react to the Secret Service's failures by increasing the agency's budget, which would be a fine example of perverse incentives.” Sure enough, the budget is now more than $3 billion a year.

Trump thanked the Service in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and one admires the bravery of the agents who shielded the former president with their own bodies. But allowing an assailant’s bullet to hit the presidents’ head is a failure; it’s sheer luck, or an act of God, as Trump put it, that he survived. 

Thank you: The pro-Trump readers may be angry at me for not blaming the assassination entirely on Biden’s rhetoric. The pro-Biden, or anti-Trump readers may be angry at me for being too dismissive of the idea that Trump is a threat to democracy. We’re happy to be one of the remaining places that has both categories of readers as well as plenty who aren’t either pro- or anti-Trump but are just pro-freedom, pro-rule-of-law, pro-growth, and pro-truth. If you appreciate independent, evidence-based information and analysis, please become a paying subscriber today.