A Common Response to Trump’s Shooting Is a Trap. Don’t Fall for It.

On Saturday night, mere hours after former U.S. President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. 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.”

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Sunday, “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to Democracy’ wasn’t some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!!” CNN contributor and Republican political consultant Scott Jennings offered, “The rhetoric around him over the last few weeks, that if he wins an election our country will end, our democracy will end, it’s the last election we’ll ever have. These things have consequences.”

These tweets and statements were an irresponsible rush to judgment as the story was still developing. (For example, it emerged on Sunday that the shooter was a registered Republican.) But worse than that, in making these comments, Vance and Co. were encouraging the very thing that they’re pretending to criticize: division and targeting of political enemies. What’s more, the comments are an attempt to use political violence to chill criticism of a political ideology that has itself inspired or been connected to violence.

Similar tactics have been used recently elsewhere in the world: Earlier this year, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was also the target of an assassination attempt.

Fico had recently been elected back into office; in 2018 he resigned after the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. And during his campaign to return to power last year, Fico attacked the media. (He had previously called journalists “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.”) He smeared his opponents and NGOs as puppets of George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist. The president of Slovakia at the time, Zuzana Caputova, sued Fico for defamation and shared that she’d received death threats after he had alleged she was an American agent.

He won reelection, continued attacking the press, and, among other acts, set about dismantling the anti-corruption special prosecutor’s office, which had conducted investigations linked to Fico’s political party.

Then, this May, a “lone wolf” shooter attempted to assassinate him. In response, Slovak Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said at a news conference, “Many of you were those who were sowing this hatred.” Deputy Prime Minister Tomas Taraba blamed opposition parties and their “false narratives” for the attack. Lubos Blaha, deputy speaker of the Slovak parliament, told opposition parties, “This is your fault,” then said to the media, “Because of you [liberal media], the four-time prime minister Robert Fico, the most significant statesman in Slovakia’s modern history, is currently fighting for his life.”

Fico—unlike the journalist murdered in Slovakia six years ago—survived. Last month, in his first public remarks since the assassination attempt, Fico said of his would-be assassin, “I forgive him,” adding, “He was only a messenger of evil and political hatred, which the politically unsuccessful and frustrated opposition developed in Slovakia to unmanageable proportions.” Fico also said that since the attempt on his life, there was “no one holding up a mirror to the growing and well-fed opposition’s aggressiveness, neither the media, nor the nongovernmental organizations.” He implied that those against him were tied to Soros. After nearly being killed, in other words, he blamed the swath of the country that disagrees with him, presenting a caricature of wild, frenzied domestic political enemies.

It’s a sentiment being echoed in the comments by Vance, Trump Jr., and Jennings, and it’s dangerous. Blaming the political opposition for evil and hatred does not bring about calm and unity; it serves to foster hatred toward other political actors—and toward the media and NGOs holding politicians accountable, as those reporting the facts sometimes get smeared by aspiring authoritarians as extensions of their political opponents.

The strategy does something else too: It aims to silence criticism. In Slovakia’s case, criticizing the shuttering of an office that looked into corruption or the overhaul of public broadcasting isn’t inciting violence. To pretend that it is is to pretend that criticism of political actors is itself violence—which it is not. It is criticism. It is a normal, healthy part of a democracy and a check on those who would make society less democratic.

This is particularly dangerous when the political actors being criticized have themselves pushed for violence. Trump, speaking at a rally in Ohio in March, said, “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole country.” (He was apparently speaking about consequences for the auto industry.) He has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last November, he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” This is the same kind of language that showed up in the manifestos of shooters who carried out mass killings in a synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018 and a grocery store in New York in 2022. It’s not violence to note the parallel; to ignore it is to allow for a violent ideology to spread unchecked.

It is similarly neither violence nor an incitement to violence to point out Trump’s antidemocratic and authoritarian plans. The assassination attempt does not eradicate the former president’s promises to gut the bureaucracy to better bend it to his will and to deploy the military domestically to carry out mass deportations. It does not allow him to escape criticism of his refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 presidential election or his attempt to invalidate votes cast in majority-Black cities for Joe Biden. It does not clear from the record the fact that he was impeached for inciting insurrection. The Supreme Court has already made it more difficult to hold him accountable for these acts through legal avenues, but the assassination attempt, as horrible as it is, does not erase those acts from reality.

The point is not that Vance and Co.—in encouraging Trump’s violent language while chastising his political detractors—are hypocritical. They are, but hypocrisy is so common in American politics as to be barely worth noting. Rather, the point is that would-be autocrats and their supporters are not bringing about unity or calm, or lowering the political temperature between rival factions, by blaming those who criticize their political programs.

We should, of course, look to our leaders to decry assassination attempts and shootings. But using such attempts to silence criticism, be it from the media or the political opposition, does not make for a more unified or safer country. Just a more divided, dangerous one.