Nothing Has Changed: Trump Is Still Trump

On Saturday, at a political rally in western Pennsylvania, three people were shot. One was a hero, a firefighter who died as he leaped to protect his children from the gunfire. One was the shooter. And the third, whose ear was grazed, was the biggest proponent of violent, extremist rhetoric in recent American history.

Little is known about the young man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, though a great deal has been made of information that tells us absolutely nothing about his motive: He was a registered Republican, and he made a $15 donation to a scammy, left-wing political action group on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

One could argue that the Democratic response has been gracious and dignified, and befitting a calamitous moment that could have torn the country further apart. The party quickly pulled advertisements and canceled campaign appearances in the wake of the shooting. And on Sunday, President Biden called for calm during a televised address from the Oval Office. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” he said. “The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do this.”

This is undoubtedly the right thing to say politically. But the suggestion of mutual blame—that Democrats and Republicans have both created a volatile situation that encourages violence—is fundamentally untrue. The man who was wounded on Saturday has spent his entire political career openly encouraging violence, including an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has mused about “Second Amendment people,” defended murderous neo-Nazis, encouraged police to shoot protesters, and spoken to a violent, right-wing group as if they were his private army. He has tried to overturn one lawful, wholly legitimate election and has suggested he will do it again, should he lose in November. He is campaigning on radically transforming the federal government, replacing thousands of employees with loyalists, and contorting it into his own authoritarian image. He has promised to “root out” his enemies who “live like vermin” and must be exterminated for the country to survive. In nearly every public statement there is contempt for democracy, decency, and pluralism.

Much has been made, in the wake of Trump’s shooting, of Democratic rhetoric—particularly that of the president. This is somewhat ironic, given that the political conversation before Saturday’s shooting had been dominated by Biden’s struggles to speak coherently, let alone critique his predecessor. Yes, Biden and his fellow Democrats have spent the past eight years depicting Trump as an existential threat to American democracy, but the idea that any of this amounts to incitement to violence is absurd.

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.

Vance and other Republicans are trying to neutralize the Biden campaign’s core message by suggesting that any criticism of Trump’s autocratic behavior is in itself a call to violence—a breathtakingly cynical exploitation of a tragedy, though one hardly out of character for a charlatan like Vance. But there’s something even more sinister going on here. Vance’s statement does the precise thing he falsely accuses Biden of doing. It presents the 2024 election as an existential contest, one in which the party occupying the White House is doing everything in its power—including encouraging murder—to destroy the man seeking to replace him. If that is the case—and it most certainly is not—then any action in defense of Trump and his movement is justified. After all, Vance has depicted this as an election with literal existential stakes: The Democrats are no longer simply trying to win an election, they are trying to literally destroy their opponents.

Nevertheless, there is—for perhaps the first time ever—a sense of symbiosis among Biden, Trump, and the media. The prevailing narrative in the wake of the assassination attempt is that everything has changed. There have been countless op-eds arguing that this is a watershed moment and an opportunity for reflection, a chance for the country to pull back from rising political violence and extremism. Democrats—and Biden in particular—have heeded that message, calling for calm and unity. Trump and his loyalists, meanwhile, have suggested that his near-death experience has left him humbled and transformed. Trump, perhaps the least religious president in American history, has leaned into the narrative of salvation and transformation. “He thinks he was handed a gift from God. He can’t believe it,” a person who spoke to Trump on Sunday told The Washington Post, adding that he felt “spiritual,” which is “totally not normal for him.” (Yes, we know.) Following Biden’s speech on Sunday, Trump posted a two-word statement on social media: “UNITE AMERICA.”

But we know how Donald Trump thinks America should be united: by reelecting him and allowing him and his cronies to ransack the country’s institutions. Indeed, Trump was back to his old tricks on Monday. After a loyalist federal judge threw out the case alleging that he illegally retained classified documents after leaving the White House, he posted this missive:

This brief statement contains an attack on the legal system, a defense of insurrectionists, and the suggestion that his political opponent is leading a sinister plot to destroy him. It is vintage Trump.

That’s the real (and really depressing) takeaway from Saturday’s events. Nothing has changed. Trump remains the biggest threat to democracy in this country. He will continue to encourage political violence in service of his political project, which is built on hatred and retribution. The attempted assassination has left him and his devotees emboldened as they attack their rivals and attempt to shut down dissent. There is no effort to lower the temperature—only to justify one side’s political attacks while silencing the other’s. And the longer Democrats cower in the wake of Saturday’s shooting, the stronger the autocrat becomes.