Trump lost no time in laying the blame directly at the door of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He declared the gunman ‘believed’ and ‘acted’ on their ‘highly inflammatory’ rhetoric. Trump was referring to Biden’s past remarks calling him a ‘threat to democracy’ and making him a target. He went on to call B&H the ‘enemy from within’ that will ‘destroy our country’.
But rhetoric doesn’t come cheap. Trump was quick to send email ‘alerts’ to fundraise off the new hook. ‘I will NEVER SURRENDER!’ but remember to show your love with $25. And so it goes, this turbulent election season marred and scarred by violence, hate and worse.
The reason why Ryan Wesley Routh hid in the bushes in a Florida golf course to take aim at Trump is yet unclear. But it hardly matters – there’s an election to be won. For the record, what’s emerging is a portrait of Routh as a disturbed and delusional man who met a gun like so many do in America. Common as white bread and predictable as night following day. Also, for the record, Routh is registered as an independent in North Carolina.
Less than 50 days before voting day, the US presidential election is again shaken and stirred, almost at a desperate point with ample reminders that both sides indulge in shocking rhetoric albeit to differing degrees. If the first reaction of Elon Musk, a Trump supporter, was to say on X, ‘And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala’ followed by a quizzical emoji, a Democrat mocked, ‘No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.’ Both posts have been deleted in national interest.
Things are in the basement. Determined to get a bounce, the Trump campaign dropped an explosive ad on Monday with the catchline, ‘Kamala and the Democrats are the Party of Violence’. It was full of clips of prominent Democrats indulging in questionable rhetoric against Trump.Biden says at a rally that if they were in high school, he would take Trump ‘behind the gym and beat the hell out of him’. Harris jokes on a TV show in 2018 about Trump meeting his end in an elevator if she rode with him. Nancy Pelosi is talking about ‘uprisings’ against Trump, while Hillary Clinton declares you cannot be ‘civil’ to a political party that ‘wants to destroy you’. Madonna says she has thought ‘an awful lot about blowing up the White House’. It’s edgy and the clips are real.On the other side, Trump routinely calls for violence against immigrants and journalists, demeans military leaders, and mocks those with disabilities. He does it so often, the shock is gone. Last year, he vowed to ‘root out’ his political opponents who he said ‘live like vermin’ in American society, echoing the words of fascists. From the time Trump announced his bid in 2015, he has painted immigrants as parasites on the system and nothing more.
He said Mexico was sending ‘rapists’ and drug dealers into the US, rhetoric that is said to have incited violence against immigrants in the years that followed. He told his supporters to ‘just knock the hell out of’ anyone daring to protest at his rallies.
When Trump was in office, White supremacists organised and got emboldened. When he lost in 2020, he incited his supporters gathered at the White House on Jan 6 and sent them on a rampage to Capitol Hill. They were ready to ‘hang’ his veep for certifying the election.
The most recent example is, of course, Trump’s bizarre claim during the presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing their neighbours’ pets to eat them. It started as a Facebook rumour that was picked by Trump and repeated. A series of bomb threats followed, shutting schools and normal life. But no hair off Trump’s coiffure with running mate J D Vance faithfully playing second fiddle.
Does it matter that Vance tried to contextualise it all as an immigration problem – 20,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield in recent years, straining local services and schools. It doesn’t, because it’s not about real issues. Plus, there’s no light in the basement to sort things out.
