The day after Secret Service agents confronted an armed man near where Donald Trump was playing golf, the former president told Fox News that the rhetoric of Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,\u201d Trump said of Ryan Wesley Routh, the man arrested after fleeing the Trump International Golf Club on Sunday. \u201cTheir rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,\u201d Trump continued.<\/p>\n
And then, seemingly in the same breath, he accused his opponents of posing a threat to the country \u2014 the same sort of assertion that he claimed had served as Routh\u2019s motivation.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd they are the ones that are destroying the country, both from the inside and out,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThese are people that want to destroy our country,\u201d he added later. \u201cIt is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s political appeals have never been particularly subtle, and this one isn\u2019t either. It\u2019s dangerous for Democrats to say these things about him, he insists \u2014 as he says those things about Democrats. It is an immediate, obvious blend of three things: his interest in making Democrats wary about describing him as a threat to democracy, his effort in presenting himself as a victim (the central theme of his 2024 candidacy) and his interest in portraying Democrats as dangerous and threatening. That these outcomes are not internally consistent is not the sort of thing Trump loses sleep over.<\/p>\n
Other Republicans are a bit more cautious in separating out those impulses, but they still amplify them. Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), for example, said that Democrats were \u201c100 percent\u201d responsible for Routh\u2019s actions \u2014 agreeing with a Fox News host\u2019s leading prompt that it was \u201cthe constant drumbeat from the left that Trump is a \u2018threat to democracy\u2019\u201d \u2014 that last phrase offered with obvious sarcasm. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), in a separate Fox News interview, suggested Democrats \u201creally need to think about the consequence of using that kind of language.\u201d<\/p>\n
Routh\u2019s intent in being at the golf course on Sunday and any motivations are still uncertain as of writing. He was charged in federal court Monday with two gun-related crimes. In social media posts attributed to him, he did express anger at Trump\u2019s effort to retain power after the 2020 election, including criticism of the Capitol riot. He also posted in April that \u201cDEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.\u201d<\/p>\n
The posts also give a sense of instability, with his political interests bouncing between the parties and candidates over time. A neighbor told reporters that he was \u201ca little cuckoo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mental instability and violence against prominent figures have an uncomfortable overlap. When a fervent Trump supporter was accused of sending pipe bombs to Democratic elected officials and members of the media, I spoke with Cheryl Paradis, a professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, who wrote a book on mental illness and criminality. She noted that public events can become a point of irrational focus for those suffering from such afflictions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s going on politically can galvanize, it can become a focus for people who have serious psychiatric illnesses,\u201d Paradis said in 2018. She added that \u201cthis is a time in which many people are watching and very focused on the upcoming election, for example \u2014 and people have strong feelings about it. People that have psychiatric illnesses, just like anyone else, can be influenced by what\u2019s going on in today\u2019s political climate.\u201d<\/p>\n
The point was made more succinctly (and less empathetically) by Trump\u2019s running mate, JD Vance, in an interview that aired on CNN several hours before Routh was confronted on the golf course.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre we not allowed to talk about these problems because some psychopaths are threatening violence?\u201d Vance told the channel\u2019s Dana Bash.<\/p>\n
Vance was defending himself against criticisms that his amplification of false and baseless claims about immigrants from Haiti led to a spate of threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio. Vance insisted that his assertions were unrelated to bomb threats that had followed his helping to amplify the idea \u2014 and that those threats shouldn\u2019t prevent him from continuing to amplify it.<\/p>\n
Former Illinois representative Joe Walsh, who was elected as a Republican but is now a fervent Trump critic, offered a similar response following news of Routh\u2019s arrest.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not complicated,\u201d he wrote on social media: \u201cI oppose Trump because I believe he IS a genuine threat to our democracy. Democracy IS on the ballot in November [and] I oppose political violence and strongly condemn this assassination attempt on Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are key differences between the situations, however. One is that the claims Vance elevated targeted a community broadly, without evidence to support what he was asserting and without any offered remedy. However one views Trump\u2019s response to the 2020 election, it\u2019s clear he tried to retain power despite his loss, with disastrous consequences. There\u2019s also a nonviolent means of addressing questions about Trump regaining power: \u201cBallots, not bullets,\u201d as Walsh\u2019s message concludes.<\/p>\n
All of this said, many Republicans sincerely believe Trump is a target of nefarious actors. After a man shot at Trump in Butler, Pa., earlier this year, Trump supporters (including Vance) suggested that \u201cthey\u201d had tried to kill the former president, attributing Thomas Crooks\u2019 actions to a broad conspiracy and to anti-Trump politics. Further investigation suggested this wasn\u2019t true, so Republicans (including Trump) pivoted to suggesting the shooting was a function of willful negligence on the part of the Biden administration.<\/p>\n
Some go further. After Routh\u2019s capture, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) offered a new suggestion that his efforts were part of an overarching plot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is very unlikely to be the last time they try to kill Trump,\u201d she wrote on social media. \u201cI do not believe these are lone wolves \u2014 crazy people \u2014 mad at him because of his \u2018rhetoric\u2019 like they want us to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even the less extreme iteration of blaming Democrats for Routh\u2019s actions, though, are politically useful for Trump. If it leads to criticisms of his authoritarian impulses being viewed as beyond the pale, his campaign team is unlikely to complain. If it generates more sympathy from his base or new sympathy from undecided voters, even better.<\/p>\n
There is a fundamental dishonesty to it, of course. Trump and his allies seek unilateral disarmament, the ability to bemoan Democratic criticisms of Trump as unacceptable and immoral while shrugging at what Trump himself says. If Trump thought it was over the line to describe him as a threat to the country, he probably wouldn\u2019t then describe Harris in that way.<\/p>\n
And, again, those criticisms are rooted in Trump\u2019s actions and campaign pledges, not in invented stories about, say, immigrants eating cats. As a leading national politician once asked, are people not allowed to talk about problems just because some psychopaths are threatening violence?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The day after Secret Service agents confronted an armed man near where Donald Trump was playing golf, the former president told Fox News that the rhetoric of Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame. \u201cHe believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,\u201d Trump […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9622,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}