By Jamelle Bouie / The New York Times
The classic example of chutzpah is that of the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan. With the 2024 presidential election, we have a new way to illustrate the point: the candidate who condones violence, dehumanizes his opponents and whips his supporters into a frenzy, then turns around to condemn the harsh rhetoric of his opponents and call for peaceful discourse.
Following the second attempt on his life in two months, Trump blamed Democrats for casting him as a threat to American democracy.
“Look,” his running mate J.D. Vance said on Monday, “we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and, if he’s elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy.” (It should be noted that Vance has said, repeatedly, that he would have helped the former president in his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.)
Trump himself was more direct. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
The obvious problem here is that Trump is infamous, going back to his first campaign for president, for condoning, encouraging and even inciting violence among his supporters.
When told, in 2015, that two Boston brothers invoked him in an assault on a homeless Hispanic man, Trump said that the people who followed him were “passionate.”
“They love this country,” he said. “They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”
When faced with a protester at a rally in Alabama, he shouted for attendees to remove him. “Get him the hell out of here!” Trump said, as rallygoers appeared to kick and punch the protester. “Get him out of here! Throw him out!”
“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump said the next day, “because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
As president, Trump urged the police to be violent when handling suspects (“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, please don’t be too nice”), praised Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., for assaulting a reporter, and also threatened to shoot “thugs” during the 2020 George Floyd protests. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he wrote on Twitter.
Trump used social media and the platform of the presidency to flood American life with a steady stream of dehumanizing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. He attacked the four congresswomen known as “the Squad” by telling them to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came.”
Perhaps it was a coincidence that, in 2016, reported hate crimes jumped by 226 percent in counties that hosted Trump campaign rallies. Perhaps it was a coincidence that hate crimes reached a 16-year high during Trump’s time in office, with a significant increase of violence against Latinos. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the Tree of Life shooter, who killed 11 Jewish worshippers in the worst incident of antisemitic violence in American history, ranted about the same migrant “caravan” that Trump hyped as a threat to the nation in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. And perhaps it was a coincidence that the young man who traveled 10 hours to target Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people, also echoed Trump’s constant warnings of an immigrant “invasion” from Latin America.
Responding to violence orchestrated against his political opponents, like the attack on Paul Pelosi that was originally intended for Nancy Pelosi, Trump laughed and joked. And then there is the grand finale of the former president’s inducements to violence during his term in office, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump told an angry crowd of his supporters that they must “fight like hell” to keep him in the White House because if they didn’t, they weren’t “going to have a country anymore.”
In the three years since, an emboldened Trump — free of any serious accountability thanks to the cowardice of the Republican Party and the supine compliance of the conservative members of the Supreme Court — has increased his use of dehumanizing rhetoric.
His political opponents, Trump says, are “vermin.” And immigrants in the country illegally who are accused of crimes, he says, are subhuman: “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’” And as we’ve seen in recent weeks, he will not hesitate to spread lies about people whose only offense was to come to this country in search of a better life.
For nearly a decade, Trump has fomented an atmosphere of political violence. Much of his appeal rests on the promise that he will dominate his enemies — who, through him, become the people’s enemies — and remove them from the body politic.
Political violence has always been part of American public life. But to the extent that it is, today, an acute problem, it is impossible to separate from the terrible influence of Donald Trump.
On Monday, Trump blamed Democrats for political violence. “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse,” he wrote.
But there is only one politician who has placed violence at the center of his movement. Only one politician who is running for president on a promise of “retribution.” Only one politician who has promised that if he is elected again, he will unleash the state against a wide array of disfavored groups.
Of course, Trump is not responsible for the attempts on his life, but if American politics is more violent than it has been, it’s hard not to notice that he tilled the soil that helped make it so.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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