Nothing Has Changed: Trump Is Still Trump

At no point has Biden, or any other prominent Democrat, even implied that their political opponents should be physically attacked in any way. Yes, Trump is being prosecuted, but that’s because of a wealth of evidence that he committed crimes: fraud, falsification of business records, willful and illegal retention of classified documents, and incitement of an insurrection to interfere with the transfer of power to Biden. Even as these prosecutions have moved at a glacial pace, benefiting Trump’s presidential campaign, Democrats have insisted that the courts and the ballot box are the only two legitimate avenues for prosecuting the case against Trump.

Some of Trump’s allies nevertheless have suggested that Saturday’s horrific assassination attempt was the inevitable result of hateful Democratic messaging. “Today is not some isolated incident,” Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance—the front-runner to be Trump’s running mate—tweeted shortly after the shooting. “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.” That sentiment was echoed by a number of fellow Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins, and Senator Tim Scott, another possible Trump V.P. pick.

Vance’s statement is a devious, if not particularly subtle, bit of rhetoric. For one thing, it relies on the presumption that the shooter was a kind of Biden brownshirt, someone radicalized by the 81-year-old president’s whispered statements about the need to protect democracy. For another, it contains a blatant lie about the “central premise” of the Biden campaign. At no point has anyone in that campaign—or, for that matter, even tangentially connected to it—suggested that Trump must be stopped at “all costs.” Indeed, the campaign has pushed only one tactic for stopping Trump: If you want to protect democracy, you have to vote in November. That’s it. There are no dog whistles, no winks to extremists, no calls to “stand back and stand by.” Just a simple plea: You may not like Joe Biden—and many people do not—but the only way to defeat autocracy is to cast a ballot in the fall.