After the assassination attempt targeting former President Donald Trump, many of his Republican allies didn’t just blame Democrats for the gunman, they also pointed to a very specific line of criticism. As a HuffPost report summarized:
High-profile Republicans have immediately blamed Donald Trump’s near-assassination on Democrats calling him a threat to democracy. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday that “when the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the republic would end, it heats up the environment.”
Johnson had plenty of company. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise added that Democrats have been “fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America.” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina claimed that the shooting in Pennsylvania was “aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
Around the same time, former Attorney General Bill Barr said on Fox News: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy. He is not.”
There’s no shortage of relevant angles to this, but as the public discussion continues to unfold, let’s keep a few details in mind.
First, at least at this point in the investigation, there is no evidence to suggest that the nature of the Democratic criticisms led to the attempt on the former president’s life.
Second, if Republicans are convinced that this specific line of argument is beyond the pale, they might want to take it up with their presumptive presidential nominee. It was literally last week when Trump described the Biden administration as a “fascist government,” as his campaign operation issued a fundraising appeal asserting as fact that President Joe Biden is “a threat to democracy.”
Two weeks earlier, the former president wrote on his social media platform, “JOE BIDEN IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, AND A THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL AND EXISTENCE OF OUR COUNTRY ITSELF!!!” The hysterical missive dovetailed with months of rhetoric in which Trump has told voters the United States would likely cease to exist if he loses.
As best as I can tell, not one of the Republicans demanding that Democrats abandon their talking point took issue with Trump’s rhetoric.
Third, at least some of the GOP voices insisting that Democrats stop characterizing Trump as a threat to democracy appear to know better. In Barr’s case, for example, Trump pressed him to prosecute his political rivals before Election Day 2020, then pressed him to help overturn the results. The Republican lawyer also recently reflected on instances in which Trump, during his White House tenure, would sometimes “lose his temper” and talk about killing people who upset him. It is, in other words, odd to hear Barr claim that it’s wrong to see Trump as an opponent of democracy. Fourth, the former president’s allies are effectively demanding that their rivals stop repeating a claim that remains rooted in fact. As we’ve discussed, this is a candidate who has repeatedly raised the prospect of creating a temporary American “dictatorship,” and who has talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions. He’s running on a platform of rejecting election results he doesn’t like, militarized camps, pardons for politically aligned criminals, friendships with foreign authoritarians he holds in high regard, and mass firings of federal bureaucrats who are deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump’s ideological ambitions. All of which leads us to the apparent motivation for the GOP pushback: Republicans want to convince Democrats to stop repeating a politically potent truth ahead of the 2024 elections. That seems unlikely to happen.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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