Donald Trump made a hero’s return to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July 13 attempt on his life. In what has been widely lauded as an ingenious rhetorical ploy, he started his speech on Saturday by connecting his appearance with the July shooting: “As I was saying….” Trump then used his remarks to stoke the flames of political division that threaten this nation — and his life a few short weeks ago.
This is all in keeping with what Trump has said and done many times, including after a second failed assassination attempt. “When former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in July, he made an initial pitch for unity. It didn't last long,” ABC News notes. “And he's taken a decidedly different tack after a second apparent assassination attempt…at his Florida golf club.”
“Less than 24 hours later,” ABC News continues, “Trump laid blame for the political violence on Democrats, telling Fox News Digital the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was ‘causing me to be shot at,’ while also asserting they are "destroying the country — both from the inside and out."
His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance joined in this dangerous blame game. "I think,” Vance said in the aftermath of the second assassination attempt, “it's time to say to the Democrats, to the media, to everybody that has been attacking this man and trying to censor this man for going on 10 years, cut it out or you're going to get somebody killed.”
The Republican ticket returned to this insidious and unfounded accusation at the second Butler rally. Vance left nothing to the imagination. He accused Democrats of using "dangerous inflammatory rhetoric" by calling Trump "a threat to democracy." He then charged that, "First, they tried to silence him. When that didn't work, they tried to bankrupt him. When that didn't work, they tried to jail him. With all the hatred they have spewed at President Trump, it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to kill him."
Eric Trump joined the pin-the-blame-on-Democrats chorus.
“They tried to kill him….It’s because the Democratic Party can’t do anything right.”
The former president took up the baton when it was his turn to speak.
"Exactly 12 weeks ago this evening on this very ground,” Trump noted, “a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and to silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country,"
He continued: “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows, maybe even tried to kill me.”
This effort to attribute the motive for the attempted assassination of a president or presidential candidate of the opposing party is as dangerous as it is unprecedented in American history. We’ve had our share of assassinations and assassination attempts, but until now they have never been a tool of combat used by the person who was almost killed or his political allies.
Trump’s charges are even more dangerous because there is no evidence to support them.
The FBI so far has been unable to identify any motive in the first attempt on Trump’s life, calling Trump a “target of opportunity..” Thomas Crooks, who was responsible for that attempt, had, the FBI says, “no definitive ideology…either left-leaning or right-leaning,”
Ryan Routh, the man who last month planned to kill Trump on his Florida golf course, seems to have been moved by an array of policy grievances against the former president, but none of them had anything to do with the Democratic Party or what Democrats have said about Trump.
Politically motivated assassinations have been much more common in Europe and elsewhere than they have been in this country. Still over the course of our history, as The Washington Post reports, “There have been at least 15 direct assaults on U.S. presidents, presidents-elect and presidential candidates alone; five of them resulted in deaths…”
A few of them were carried out by people like Routh who had political reasons for trying to kill a president, though none of them were allied with or working for the political party opposed to their targets. Most of the others were the work of people suffering from a mental illness or who were looking to become a celebrity. None of them had any political affiliation or were inspired by things said by partisans.
For example, the first attempt on a president’s life occurred on Jan. 30, 1835 when someone the Post called “a troubled, unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence armed himself that day with two pistols and hid behind a pillar in the U.S. Capitol to ambush President Andrew Jackson.”
The next assassination attempt happened thirty years later in 1865 when John Wilkes Booth, a devotee of the defeated Confederacy, shot and killed Abraham Lincoln. However, he was not acting as an agent of Lincoln’s partisan opponents.
As troubled as they were, Lincoln’s friends and colleagues did not try to blame members of other political parties.
The man who killed President James Garfield, Charles Guiteau was, like Lawrence, mentally disturbed. He claimed to have shot Garfield out of disappointment at being passed over for appointment as Ambassador to France.
Presidential candidates, like Trump, have also been targeted. Here too, people did not try to make hay out of assassinations or assassination attempts.
The first attempt to kill a presidential candidate happened on October 14, 1912. On that date, Theodore Roosevelt, another former president campaigning for a return to the White House, was shot by a mentally ill bar owner from New York City named John Schrank. According to the Washington Post, “Schrank died in a mental institution in 1943.”
Robert Kennedy was killed during the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination campaign by a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who “was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel.” As shocking as Kennedy’s killing was to a nation deeply divided over the war in Vietnam, none of Kennedy’s allies tried to pin the blame on his political opponents.
Four years after Kennedy’s assassination, segregationist George C. Wallace was, like Trump, shot during a campaign appearance. The man who shot him, Arthur Bremer, was seeking fame, not trying to advance a political cause. Wallace, who was as divisive in his time as Trump is in ours, did not use the attempt on his life to discredit his opponents.
How times have changed in American politics.
Breaking from the past, Trump and his cronies are trying to turn tragedy into political capital and stoke the flames of political division, all the while saying that it is the Democrats who need to take responsibility for their overheated rhetoric. The former president and others in the MAGA orbit do us all a disservice by their effort to again turn American history on its head.
