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Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has called on Democrats to rein in their use of “inflammatory political rhetoric” in the wake of the latest attempt on the life of the Republican presidential nominee, days after attracting criticism himself for spreading false claims about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating domestic pets in Springfield, Ohio.
“I do think that we should take this opportunity to call for a reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric coming from too many corners of our politics,” the Ohio senator said during an address to the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition in Atlanta on Monday.
“Look, we can disagree with one another. We can debate with one another. But we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it will be the end of American democracy.”
He continued: “If you tell the American people that this person is the end of democracy, if you tell the American people that this person needs to be eliminated, most of them, thank God, are going to ignore you.
“But some crazy person is going to take matters into their own hands and actually listen to the crazy rhetoric that you’re putting out there.”
Vance was speaking a day after Secret Service agents had prevented a would-be gunman from potentially firing on Trump as he played a round of golf near his Mar-a-Lago home in West Palm Beach, Florida, the second attempt on the candidate’s life after he was shot in the ear by a sniper in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
The suspect — Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, a Hawaii construction company owner who had developed an obsession with the war in Ukraine — had concealed himself for hours in shrubbery in the hope of getting a clear shot at Trump before being forced to flee the scene when he was spotted by the former president’s security detail.
Routh was quickly apprehended and subsequently charged with two federal gun offenses.
The incident has since inspired Republicans like Eric Trump, Tim Scott and Byron Donalds to publicly denounce Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for repeatedly calling Trump “a threat to democracy” and Vance himself to issue a lengthy post on X accusing the media of “double standards” in its coverage.
The GOP’s criticism fails to take into account Trump’s own well-documented history of dangerous rhetoric, from his dehumanizing description of asylum seekers as “vermin” to his mockery of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the shocking hammer attack suffered by her husband Paul Pelosi when an assailant broke into their San Francisco home in October 2022.
“Nancy Pelosi has a big wall around her house. Of course it didn’t help too much with the problem she had, did it?” Trump joked in Charlotte, North Carolina, as recently as September 6.
The Republican nominee also called Harris, his Democratic rival, “a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist” as recently as Friday, further undermining Vance’s argument.
However, it was the senator himself who first amplified the conspiracy theory about immigrants devouring cats and dogs in smalltown Ohio, which dominated American political discourse in the week prior to the attack on Trump after the candidate himself repeated the lie at his televised debate with Harris in Philadelphia on September 10.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump declared in a viral moment from the NBC debate stage.
“The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.”
The town’s City Hall and its schools were subsequently targeted with a spate of at least 33 bomb threats in the days that followed, according to Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine.
Vance was then forced to defend spreading the story during his appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he told host Kristen Welker.
Seemingly admitting its inaccuracy, he added: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In response to Vance’s latest remarks, MSNBC presenter Joe Scarborough accused him of “gaslighting” the American public on Tuesday’s instalment of Morning Joe, recounting his own personal experience of Trump “suggesting that I should be executed after he was angry at my Covid reporting.”
Scarborough invoked further examples of the former president calling for the brutal silencing of his political opponents before concluding: “We’re talking about violence here. Again, the real introduction of violent rhetoric in America, in presidential campaigns, has been unprecedented since Trump first came onto the scene in 2016.”
