Democrats are currently beside themselves about immigrants (not) eating people’s pets. More seriously, however, they have been quick to blame GOP rhetoric for threats of violence against immigrant communities.
When the town at the center of the controversy received several bomb threats earlier this week, these certain liberals knew exactly where to look for blame. And, of course, it wasn’t at the people actually making the bomb threats.
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) admitted that he “[didn’t] know about that specific situation,” but went on to opine, “This wouldn’t be the first time that a right-wing leader like Donald Trump has gotten people scared of a certain ethnic group or certain people and pushed them to do something like this.”
His colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), also didn’t know much about what was actually happening, but she similarly knew whom to blame: “When it comes to this specific incident, we’ll have to wait on the details and what gets confirmed, but we do know that this is a pattern that Republican and extreme right-wing organizations have used.”
Give them both credit. At least they admitted they had no idea what the hell they were talking about. They probably should have held their tongues as a consequence, but hey, it’s a first step.
Democrats blaming Republican language for things isn’t new. It seems that, for them, whenever anything bad happens in this country, the root cause is GOP rhetoric.
When Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was attacked in his home in 2022, NBC News ran an opinion piece that argued that “the downward spiral of feculence that has engulfed large swaths of the GOP in recent years…,” contributed directly to the violence. The culprit: “Daily assaults by conservative pundits on TV and a nonstop feed of anti-progressive vitriol on right-wing social media….”
For clarity: The people with blood on their hands (indeed, that was the title of the piece) were Trump and then-House Republican Kevin McCarthy (Calif). Not the violent guy with a hammer.
That same year, the left also blamed “Fox News and MAGA Republicans” for the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. There, in a curious twist, GOP policies on gun rights weren’t as much to blame as was, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Republican language on racism, white supremacy and replacement theory. “These hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat to the American way of life,” he claimed.
Back in January, I wrote that anti-Trumpers were playing a dangerous game with their incendiary rhetoric about Donald Trump. I worried then, as I do now, that accusations of impending dictatorship, threats to our democracy, and comparisons (as made by Hillary Clinton, amongst many others) to Adolf Hitler, could encourage mentally unstable people to commit acts of violence against the former president.
I consider myself proven right. Since then, there have been two very real attempts on Trump’s life. And while the same people who attack him verbally for being an existential threat to the nation condemn the violence, they don’t change their eliminationist rhetoric about him in the slightest.
Indeed, just a couple of days after the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, a Democratic lawmaker from that state proclaimed that “we are on the verge of a dictatorship.” And then, stunningly, he went on to blame GOP rhetoric about Democrats being “socialist” for “creating the environment” that led to Trump’s own shooting.
Neither did the first assassination attempt encourage even the highest-ranking Democrats to change their language. Before the bandage was off Trump’s ear, one Democratic senator was already reiterating the talking point that he was “an existential threat to our democracy.”
More recently, at the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris dog-whistled that Trump was “attacking the foundations of our democracy.”
I do not believe that Democrats condone violence generally. And I think they know, as well as anyone, that heated political rhetoric — even Republican rhetoric — doesn’t typically move normal people to violence.
But I also know that, to them, when it comes to Trump, things are just different.
I don’t often agree with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), but she was correct when she noted that “[t]he biggest problem with this kind of really psychotic rhetoric is that, unfortunately, there are sad and demented people in our country that then do believe these things and eventually attack.”
My fear is that she wasn’t directing those words to her own party. Or, if she were, that when it comes to Trump, they just aren’t listening.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.