Where Were Calls for De-Escalation When Libraries Were Being Targeted?

Maybe cable news commentators’ and even Democratic politicians’ demands to de-escalate political rhetoric are just a reflex. They don’t seem to recognize that Trump has been a major factor in the recent escalation in political violence in the United States. Or if they do, they are not acting like it.

Some have seized on the shooting as just the latest opportunity to blame Democrats for something Trump is doing. For example, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claims God spared Trump to give the United States “another chance,” told CNN viewers on Monday that when Democrats say that democracy is endangered by Trump, people will “act upon it.” When host Anderson Cooper pointed out that Trump has also accused Democrats of endangering democracy, Johnson replied, “everybody is prone to overstatement.” Trump has reinforced this reflex, this insistence that his opposition are “fascists,” at the same time as his now-V.P. candidate J. D. Vance claimed that those fearing authoritarianism are the ones to blame for the shooter’s actions.

“The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity,” noted Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept. “The issue, rather, is what picture of ‘political violence’ this messaging serves.” In this instance, we see people condemning political violence against Trump who have not condemned political violence against those he threatens routinely—immigrants, Black people, trans people. These selective condemnations may be hypocritical, but hypocrisy doesn’t describe the political work the condemnations are doing. To offer condemnations of political violence only when the right is the object of political violence serves as a form of discipline, to subdue those who are the targets of right’s political violence and all those who oppose it.