There is no place for political violence in America. That was the succinct and repetitively stated message sent by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and a myriad of Democratic politicians on Sept. 15 after what the FBI is calling a second assassination attempt on former president and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
An incident involving a man with a gun outside the West Palm Beach golf club where Donald Trump was golfing Sunday is being treated as a second assassination attempt although the suspect, Ryan Routh, fired no shots, did not have Trump in his sights, had made no threats against Trump and is a former Trump voter who became disillusioned and supported other Republican candidates, including Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Routh has a checkered past of arrests and another incident with a weapon, and is a staunch supporter of Ukraine. He had been to Ukraine several times since the Russian invasion and had tried to organize foreign troops to fight on behalf of the beleaguered nation. Routh had been interviewed by several media outlets about this, including the New York Times and Semafor.
Routh has no terrorism profile nor was he on FBI or CIA radar as posing any domestic or foreign threat. He was arrested without incident on the highway by local Florida police Sunday after a bystander phoned in his license plate number.
Unlike the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania in July where a bystander was killed and Trump had a minor graze wound to his ear that left no scar, no one was injured and the only shots fired were by the Secret Service. Congress is still investigating that incident.
In theory, the arrest of Routh, and most of all lack of any injuries to anyone, are indicative of the Secret Service doing their job. But that a man who as a convicted felon could not legally own a gun had an assault rifle and was in fact outside the golf course where the former president was impromptu that day raises questions. And the possibility of violence was certainly in play.
In their comments about the incident, Biden and Harris were declarative about political violence having no place in America. But those sentiments were not echoed by Trump nor his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance. And to date, neither has issued a statement against political violence, like Biden and Harris. Rather both men fairly immediately asserted that the words and actions of Democrats—notably references to Trump being a threat to democracy—had incited Routh and caused the incident.
Intensifying the rhetoric
While Trump used the incident to fundraise for his campaign, Vance ratcheted up the rhetoric against Harris and even suggested that the fact no one had tried to assassinate her was proof that the real threat was from Democrats. “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” Vance said.
The White House said such rhetoric was dangerous. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Sept. 18, “When you make comments like that, all it does is … opens an opportunity for people to listen to you and potentially take you very seriously, and so it’s dangerous to have that type of rhetoric out there.”
Jean-Pierre said Biden has called for rhetoric like Vance’s to be minimized. “We should not be speaking that way. We should not be saying those things,” she said. “We gotta tone it down.”
Implied threat to Kamala Harris
Vance’s comments about Harris were a shocking statement of actual incitement echoed by Elon Musk to his 200 million followers on Twitter/X. Musk has endorsed Trump and agreed to join his Cabinet should he be elected in November. Musk regularly posts inflammatory and incendiary statements and in November 2022, when Paul Pelosi was critically injured by a different Trump supporter, Musk posted a tweet suggesting the violent attack on the 82-year-old husband of then-Secretary of State Nancy Pelosi was actually a gay tryst gone awry. Musk deleted the tweet after Hillary Clinton called him out on the social media site.
Anti-Haitian attacks fueled threats
There is a disturbing irony in the counterclaims by the right about who is really the source of political violence in America. Mere hours before Routh’s arrest, Vance was interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union and NBC’s Meet the Press about the inflammatory hate speech against Haitian immigrants he and Trump had been spewing since Trump’s disastrous debate performance in Philadelphia on Sept. 10 in which Trump claimed the immigrants were kidnapping and eating pets. The claim was refuted at the debate by moderator David Muir and again throughout the week by multiple law enforcement and city officials.
In the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance acknowledged that “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”
Those words by Vance, first stated by Trump have led to bomb threats and evacuations and lockdowns in city buildings, medical centers and schools in Springfield. More than 30 bomb threats are linked to the false claims of Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating pets.
For days, prior to the incident involving Routh, Trump had been asked about the bomb threats and refused to respond by either calling for an end to the threats or even saying they were wrong and that such violence has no part in the national discourse. He refused at every point.
Harris says such rhetoric must stop
During an interview with reporters hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, Harris said of Trump’s spreading false stories about Haitian immigrants and the subsequent bomb scares, “It’s gotta stop. We’ve gotta say you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the United States of America engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country.”
And therein lies the basic problem of this election and the rhetoric that has been parlayed by the right. After the assassination attempt in Butler, Trump pledged to be a unity candidate. That never materialized. On Sept. 17, CNN anchor Abby Phillip put together a reel of clips of Trump in recent interviews and at rallies calling Harris a range of vitriolic names, including “Comrade Kamala Harris,” and claiming she is a “Marxist,” a “fascist,” “scum” and “total garbage” and saying if she is elected, the U.S. will become a third-world nation and dissolve into anarchy.
Hillary Clinton says press must be vigilant
Yet as Hillary Clinton said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow on Sept. 16, “I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.”
Clinton added, “Americans need to understand that they have to take Trump both seriously and literally. He has said what he wants to do. He and his allies with Project 2025, his desire to be a dictator, at least on day one, all of that is in the public record.”
She said it’s difficult to maintain this knowledge and act on it, but that it’s essential. “And I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what, frankly, is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents.”
The fact is, the violence of Jan. 6 shifted the entire tone of political discourse in America. The reason Harris says Trump is a threat to democracy and other Democrats echo that is because Trump tried to overturn a free and fair election for the first time in U.S. history. That action has led to his indictment and being charged with a series of felonies.
The ACLU puts it succinctly: “Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him is not only a lie—no widespread voter fraud was detected in that election—it’s a lie that breeds public mistrust in our electoral system. Today, he is already casting doubt on the 2024 election, saying he will accept the results ‘if everything is honest.’ The implication is that if Trump loses then the election may not have been honest, and that a free and fair election this November is only one in which he wins.”
Saying Trump is a threat to democracy is not a violent rhetorical statement—it’s an historical fact. And claiming otherwise puts every American at risk, most obviously those Trump and Vance have demonized, from Haitian immigrants to LGBTQ+ people to women seeking abortions. The volume of targets only widens. And their dangerous rhetoric threatens us all.
