Bullet and the ballot box: violent US rhetoric comes ‘home to roost’
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump by a gunman at his Pennsylvania rally has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed.
(The Malaysian Reserve) – US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the 2021 US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election.
The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist who wanted to hold the Democratic leader hostage and “break her kneecaps.”
The political affiliations of Saturday’s shooter, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, were not immediately clear — but analysts and politicians immediately pointed the finger at extreme political discourse.
“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” House Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who was seriously wounded in a mass shooting at a congressional sports event in 2017, said on X.
“Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”
Senior Trump campaign aide Chris LaCivita assailed the language of “leftist activists, Democrat donors and even Joe Biden.”
While Ajamu Baraka, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s running mate in 2016, suggested Democratic rhetoric might have led the gunman to see it as his “patriotic duty to eliminate an existential threat to the nation.”
“The chickens have really come home to roost,” he posted on X.
Private security
What none of the three acknowledged was that Trump himself has been a major architect of the coarsening in US political discourse in recent years.
Many of Trump’s targets in Congress and the government — from Republican Senator Mitt Romney to retired top government scientist Anthony Fauci — have disclosed having to take on private security after threats from Trump’s supporters.
The former US president sparked fury last year when he implied that the country’s top military officer should be executed, and joked about the Pelosi hammer attack.
Trump’s exhortations to violence are nothing new — he suggested that protesters should be “roughed up” at a rally in 2016, and that looters should be shot during the 2020 racial protests over the police murder of George Floyd.
