It didn’t take long after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday before partisans and conspiratorialists postulated unfounded theories about the event.
Instead of calling for calm, these folks used the event to further divide the nation. Some of the worst offenders were prominent politicians.
“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,” argued U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, in a post on X (formerly Twitter). He has since been named Trump’s vice-presidential pick.
The motives of the shooting suspect, Thomas Matthew Crooks, remain unknown – and were even less clear at the time of Vance’s inappropriate post. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA firebrand from Georgia, blamed the Biden administration: “She claimed that some Democratic lawmakers “cosponsored legislation to TERMINATE Trump’s Secret Service protection.” One GOP member of Congress posted that Biden “sent the orders.”
After the shooting, Trump and some of his allies signaled a new tone, one that focused on peace and unity.
But then the former president couldn’t help himself from posting his usual divisive rhetoric on his social-media account: “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks….” It’s too bad he couldn’t give such divisive rhetoric a rest.
One musician rightly received harsh criticism for stating, “Don’t miss Trump next time.” The New York Times reported “unsubstantiated theories about the shooting were fueled in part by left-wing accounts, including that Mr. Trump had deliberately staged the shooting to improve his election chances.” Where does such nonsense come from?
This feeds the narrative that America’s political divisions are so severe that no one can agree on any set of facts, or avoid absurd theorizing. President Biden struck the right tone in noting, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence, ever, period, no exceptions.”
It seems obvious, but that’s where the country finds itself.
Let’s all calm down and let the facts unfold.
