By December 2023, the Biden campaign’s frequent equation of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler had caught the attention even of some in the mainstream media. “In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step,” wrote Politico. “For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” CNN predicted that the Trump-is-Hitler “attack line” would likely be “central” to the president’s efforts to win reelection. Other outlets contributed their own Trump-Hitler comparisons. The New Republic’s June 2024 issue, a special report on “American Fascism,” showed a blended image of Trump and the Führer on its cover.
It was not even necessary to make an explicit Hitler comparison; the similarities were too obvious. Robert Kagan told the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart that Trump was a “natural dictator.” If you “give him unchecked power in the United States, I think any sensible person would find that a frightening proposition.” Americans are whistling past the graveyard, Kagan warned. All checks on presidential power will be impotent against Trump’s attacks on the Founder’s constitutional order, he declared.
“Existential threats” can seem to demand a different set of rules from those governing ordinary political life. Had the July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler been successful, the plotters would have been greeted across the world as heroes.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who missed blowing out Donald Trump’s brain by a few inches and who murdered a Trump supporter instead, may have thought of himself as just such a hero-in-waiting.
So now we gaze into the abyss. Every act of political violence opens up the prospect of the collapse of civil order. When political disagreement becomes lethal and political leaders risk their lives to run for or occupy political office, we trade the civil peace bequeathed to us by centuries of Western civilization for Third World anarchy.
For at least a year, many of us have felt a sense of dread that Trump would be assassinated, in light of the nonstop, ubiquitous rhetoric against him. The only question was whether that attack would come before the election or after. Some public intellectuals even welcomed such a potential attack.
But now, the mainstream media are enraged that Trump supporters are invoking that rhetoric as a cause of the assassination attempt. On Sunday morning, a CNN correspondent disapprovingly noted House Speaker Mike Johnson’s reference to President Biden’s recent statement: “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” According to the press, it was Republican rhetoric and Republican “narratives” in the wake of the assassination attempt that should concern us. “We are seeing Republicans blame Biden and the Democrats before we even see the motive,” fumed a CNN pundit. “Does Mike Johnson mean to assign blame and escalate or calm things down?”
The talking heads predicted that leading Republicans, including Trump, would try to turn the assassination into a wedge issue. Don’t they realize that they need to reach out to independents and to Nikki Haley supporters? plaintively asked the CNN bench.
The New York Times’s senior Trump-basher, Peter Baker, singled out Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio for their statements blaming the opposition for the attack. Vance had tweeted: “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.”
Other outlets are simply silencing the expression of a connection between the rhetorical fusillades against Trump and the actual shooting. On Sunday morning, NBC News Now interviewed the mayor of a Pennsylvania town near the assassination site. When the mayor started to condemn the language used against Trump, the reporter cut him off. That was not an appropriate line of inquiry, the reporter explained.
Two things can be true: highly emotional rhetoric can be a but-for cause of political violence, and it is usually inappropriate to hold speakers of such rhetoric responsible for political violence committed by an unrelated actor.
Several other things are also true: what one side of a political divide regards as patently dangerous rhetoric the other side will view as simple truth. And when the perpetrators of violence and the perpetrators of political hyperbole change sides, the assignment of fault will, too.
Democrats are brushing aside Biden’s “Trump in a bullseye” comment. But after the assassination attempt on Congressman Gabby Giffords in 2011, a comedian tweeted: “Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?”, referring to a Palin campaign ad that had paired a crosshairs icon with Democratic congressional districts.
That same year, Anders Breivik committed mass murder in Norway. The New York Times connected the killing to “Anti-Muslim Thought in [the] U.S.,” as a headline put it.
Sadly, it is not inconceivable that a right-wing nutcase would have tried (and may still try) to assassinate Biden, inspired by Republican charges that Biden is a threat to democracy and that America will not survive his reelection.
Those who deny any symmetry between extreme left-wing and right-wing rhetoric are not paying attention. Here are some recent headlines from conservative publications: “Joe Biden Is a Threat to the Constitution;” “The Biden Administration Is Waging War on the First Amendment;” “A New Offensive: Trump, the GOP, and the Battle for America’s Future;” “BIDEN VS. DEMOCRACY.” On April 2, 2024, Trump told a rally: “This country is finished if we don’t win this election. A scholar said it: If we don’t win, this may be the last election our country has.”
I happen to agree with most of those statements (though not the last). It is the Left that has the revolutionary project, the Right that merely wishes to stop the revolution. It is also true that the reach and amplification of the Left’s worldview by the media and other leading institutions overwhelm the resources of the Right. Nonetheless, the point remains: what sounds factual, not hyperbolic, to one side, to the other side sounds like wild-eyed ravings, cut off from any connection to reality. The chasm between our worldviews, down to the most basic understanding of biological fact, is too great.
The charges that the Biden administration is using every available lever to suppress dissent from elite orthodoxies, that it is endangering merit and discrediting the traditional family, that it is fomenting race hatred, may be simple truth to the right. To the left, such beliefs are unhinged.
And if a right-wing nutcase did take a pop at Biden, especially in retaliation for the attack on Trump, the mainstream media and the Democrats will immediately blame Republican rhetoric for demonizing the president. Republicans would protest that it is unfair to tie political speech to violence, and that we should look instead at the individual behavior and circumstances of the shooter.
Calls for toning down the “overheated” rhetoric, such as President Biden’s on Sunday, are unlikely to go far. Many Democrats sincerely believe that Trump is the next coming of Hitler. If they really believe that, what are they supposed to say? Likewise, how else can Republicans express their dismay with Biden without warning of the threat they believe he poses to American traditions and cohesion?
Our divides are as much epistemological as political. It was just as futile to exhort the believers in a rigged election to stop agitating about it; they sincerely believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
But some asymmetries in our world seem independent of our inevitable epistemological blinders. The FBI and other intelligence agencies have warned for years that the biggest domestic threat facing the U.S. was from right-wing extremists. We were to believe that conservatives were more prone to political violence than progressives, notwithstanding the billions of dollars of destruction from the torching of cities by Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists that have zero counterpart among conservative activists. Biden made no mention of such violence in his Oval Office remarks last night. We were to believe that the celebrations of Hamas terrorism among college professors and students have a counterpart on the right. Yet no MAGA riots followed the attempted murder of Donald Trump. If some miscreant tried to harm President Biden, would the campuses, or the cities, be tranquil?
And now the media are carefully editing the FBI’s threat assessment in order to strip it of its political content. According to the press, the assassination attempt was exactly what FBI director Christopher Wray had been warning about: “political violence.” But Wray’s warning was more specific: it was “white supremacist” or “right-wing” extremists that posed the biggest danger, he said. That assessment was based on ideology, not on reality.
It is impossible at the moment to see a clear way out of America’s impasse. Both sides of the political divide regard the other side as threats, and, to speak plainly, both increasingly hate one another. No amount of “dialogue across differences”-type programs is going to change that situation. Is either side willing to take the first step and say: “We will no longer use apocalyptic terms to describe what hangs on this election?” How can they, when those terms are viewed by those using them as empirical descriptions of reality? Biden said on Sunday that he believes with all his “soul” that this election would “shape the future of America and the world for decades to come.” Both parts of that statement are undoubtedly accurate.
It is necessary and perhaps actually useful to insist that Americans must stand together. But no sooner do we hear, say, that in America the “rule of law is respected” and that we need to fight “misinformation” than the divisions rise up again. MSNBC did not run Morning Joe today, allegedly for fear that a participant would say something that would be viewed as inappropriate. The only way to cool down the rhetoric, apparently, is not to air it at all.
For now, one pressing political issue, at least, was put to rest on Saturday. Following Trump’s heroic fist pump, it likely no longer matters whether Biden stays in the race or not.
Photos: Alex Wong/Getty Images (left) / Stephanie Keith/Getty Images (right)