Throwing Bullets in Glass Houses

After a young man with an AR-style assault rifle appeared to attempt to assassinate former President Trump, it didn’t take long for MAGA Republicans to point the finger at “violent rhetoric” from Democrats. The front page of Breitbart declared, “Hit [against Trump] Comes After Years of Violent Rhetoric from MAGA Haters.” Republican congressman Ronny Jackson of Texas was more pointed in a post on X. “Trump-deranged Left wing LUNATICS that parade around…demonizing Trump and calling him Hitler are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for this violent attack on President Trump’s life!!” he wrote. “They have BLOOD on their hands. ENOUGH of the VIOLENT RHETORIC!” 

There has, of course, been some unacceptable rhetoric from people on the political left. For example, during a conversation between Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, Thiel sarcastically thanked “Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump because they had turned him into ‘a martyr,’ thereby increasing his chances of re-election.” To which Hoffman replied: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.” However much one despises Trump — and I very much do — such language is morally wrong and strategically counterproductive. People on the left should avoid it.

Conservatives like Jackson also claim that likening Trump to Hitler is “violent” rhetoric, which may have contributed in some way to the apparent assassination attempt (though we do not yet know the shooter’s motive). Yet the fact that Trump is a would-be dictator should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Even leading MAGA figures have said as much, including J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate. According to reports, Vance apparently wrote to his former roommate: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad … or that he might be America’s Hitler.” Trump is a fascist candidate and Project 2025 is a fascist playbook. Progressives cannot be admonished for speaking the obvious truth. 

This is reflected in the violent political rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA followers. In 2016, Trump notoriously suggested that someone should assassinate Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” More recently, Trump boosted a post on Truth Social calling for a televised military tribunal for Liz Cheney. During a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, involving white nationalists, resulting in the death of one person after a neo-Nazi plowed his car through a crowd, Trump claimed that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

After Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked by someone wielding a hammer, Trump joked to a crowd of followers: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. How’s her husband doing — anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” The crowd can be heard laughing. On a different occasion, he said, “We had no terror during my administration. The only terror we had was Nancy Pelosi, who’s a crazed lunatic. She’s a lunatic. She is a crazed lunatic. What the hell was going on with her husband? Let’s not ask. … By the way, she’s got a wall around her house, obviously in that case it didn’t work very well,” he said while chuckling. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image of underwear, which Pelosi’s husband was wearing (with no pants) at the time of the attack, along with a hammer. “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Trump did not hold back from such comments even when his targets were in the highest ranks of the military. In 2023, Trump suggested that Mark Milley, the joint chiefs chairman, should be executed for engaging in “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Milley’s alleged crime? Making a phone call — which was “explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials” — to “reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

After George Floyd was murdered by police, Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase that “has a racist history going back to police brutality against Black Americans in the 1960s.” According to the former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” about people protesting police brutality. He also said, in June 2020, that “if a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

In the midst of the Covid lockdowns, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” As an NBC article notes, these exhortations “pushed many online extremist communities to speculate whether the president was advocating for armed conflict, an event they’ve termed ‘the boogaloo,’ for which many far-right activists have been gearing up and advocating since last year.” This year, Trump posted a picture on Truth Social of a truck with an image of Biden lying on the ground, tied up, painted on the back. A bumper sticker said: “Let’s Go Brandon,” a euphemism among MAGA followers for “F*** Joe Biden.”

In addition to saying that some Mexican immigrants are “rapists” and implementing a “Muslim ban,” he spoke privately “about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh.” He also suggested “that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks,” although “the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.” (Note that with the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, which essentially makes the U.S. president a king who’s entirely above the law, this would not be illegal, as long as it were an “official act” coming from Trump.)

In 2018, Trump applauded a Republican member of Congress for having assaulted a reporter. “Any guy that can do a body slam,” Trump said, “he is my type.” Two years later, he praised law enforcement for killing an “antifa supporter” who was suspected of having murdered a member of the right-wing Patriot Prayer group, saying: “And the U.S. marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

In 2023, Trump posted an image of himself holding a baseball bat while looking at a picture of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who convened a grand jury that “indicted Trump … on charges that he falsified records at his company to conceal a scheme to pay hush money” to porn star Stormy Daniels. In another post, Trump threatened “death and destruction” if “such a false charge” were to proceed, which he says “could be catastrophic for our Country.” In yet another, he describes his opponents as “HUMAN SCUM!”

After the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Trump told a far-right audience in 2022 that “this thing they did involving Gretchen Whitmer was fake. Just like those who instigated Jan. 6. It was a fake deal. Fake. It was a fake deal.” 

This brings us to Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters engaged in domestic terrorism by storming the U.S. Capitol, shouting “Hang Mike Pence” (which Trump “expressed support for”), leaving feces and urine in the hallways and injuring 174 police officers, four of whom subsequently committed suicide within the next seven months after the attack. As nearly everyone knows, Trump told the mob just before the incident that “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” to which he added that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.” They must, therefore, “fight like hell” to prevent Biden from becoming president. At the same rally, Rudy Giuliani declared that supporters should pursue “trial by combat,” and that “if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail.”

Many other MAGA notables have repeated Trump’s overtly violent rhetoric. In 2016, a “state lawmaker in New Hampshire, who co-chairs the Trump campaign’s national veterans’ coalition,” said that “he wants Hillary Clinton shot for treason.” Marjorie Taylor Greene — who once suggested that “Jewish space lasers” were causing wildfires in California — “liked” a Facebook comment saying that “a bullet to the head” of Pelosi “would be quicker” than removing her from office. She later added that Pelosi is “guilty of treason,” which she described as “a crime punishable by death.” On yet another occasion, she responded to someone “who suggested that former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be hanged by saying: ‘Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.’”

In 2021, the far-right congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona “tweeted an anime-style video that showed a character that looks like him killing another character meant to be New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” A GOP candidate for governor in North Carolina recently went on a rant in which he declared that “some folks need killing.” And many Republicans in Congress have posted videos of themselves posing with guns, sometimes for Christmas cards that include their children also holding guns. Many have released political ads showing them shooting guns and, in one case, blowing up a car labeled “socialism.” In 2023, just “days after multiple mass shootings” happened in the United States, some Republican congresspeople started wearing “new pins on their lapels in the shape of miniature AR-15 rifles,” the sort of weapons that “have been used in most of the high profile mass shootings in recent years.” In fact, the young man who recently tried to assassinate Trump was using an AR-style gun. 

There is nothing like this on the other side of the political spectrum. It’s the GOP’s rhetoric and behaviors that have normalized talk of violence, civil war, executions, the imprisonment of political rivals and so on. Consider a Washington state man who threatened “to kill a local Syrian-born man.” When questioned by the police, he said that “he wanted the victim to ‘get out of my country,’ adding, ‘That’s why I like Trump.’” Or consider the recent — this year — incident in which Republicans at a fundraiser violently kicked and beat “a mannequin wearing a mask of Joe Biden,” as seen in this video. Or the sort of online talk among far-right communities in the wake of Trump being shot, as when one wrote “CIVIL.FUCKING.WAR. I’m ready to be done with this fucking shit from Democrats,” while another declared: “Fuck the DNC, Fuck the RINOs, fuck the FEDs and fuck the MSM. They should all be hung in the streets.”

Then there is Project 2025, which states that “educators and public librarians who purvey [transgender ideology] should be classed as registered sex offenders,” and advocates mass deportations and the building of “huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” On Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, the leader of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, said that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

All of this is to underline the fact that we are living in an increasingly volatile and dangerous period of U.S. history. The MAGA movement has shifted the Overton window with repeated calls for executions, military tribunals and its vitriolic hatred of the media, which Trump calls the “enemy of the people.” Democrats and progressives are not responsible for this shift.

I am heartened that many people on the political left have unequivocally denounced the assassination attempt on Trump. Political violence is never justified, even in the face of grave threats to our democracy. But we should not allow the people who’ve mainstreamed violent rhetoric to change the narrative. As a writer for Jimmy Fallon tweeted after the shooting, “Donald Trump would be making fun of Biden for getting shot and he definitely wouldn’t stop campaigning.”