Heated Political Rhetoric Is Usually Not Fatal

Trump and Vance should stop blaming Democratic rhetoric (and vice versa).

Having survived a second assassination attempt in as many months, former President Donald Trump knows precisely whom to blame: his political enemies, the media, and the Democrats. (Three sides of the same coin.)

"He believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it," Trump told Fox News—referencing Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old would-be assassin who was apprehended on Sunday after camping out at the Trump International Golf Course. "Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out."

Trump's running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), has said similar things.

"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," said Vance. "I think that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt."

It's true that the other side increasingly talks about Trump in apocalyptic terms: a threat to democracy, fascist, Hitler, etc. But Trump's own rhetoric is often quite inflammatory. He's called Harris a Marxist, a communist, and, for good measure, a fascist. And back when he was a prominent Never Trumper, Vance himself called Trump every awful name in the book.

Political figures often use heated rhetoric, make unfair comparisons, and aggressively inflate the views, statements, and character of their political enemies. This has gone on forever. Whether it exacerbates the problem of political violence is extremely unclear. Republicans once claimed to understand this, and correctly pushed back on Democrats and media figures who lazily and falsely blamed the right for inspiring the shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D–Ariz.). It's demoralizing to see Trump and Vance easily succumb to the temptation to do the exact same thing.

Calls to tamp down on inflammatory rhetoric are fine, but the public should be wary of attempts to draw any causal lines between heated language and real-world violence. As always, it's important to remember that there is very, very little political violence in the U.S. Americans are far more likely to engage in violence against one another due to tensions in the workplace or the home—politically-motivated hatred is a component of shockingly few crimes.

 

This Week on Free Media

I'm joined by Amber Duke to discuss the second Trump assassination attempt, the pet-eating controversy, Hillary Clinton's idea to criminalize the spreading of misinformation, and Anna Navarro's latest hot take.

 

Worth Watching

I have finally had time to begin the second season of Amazon Prime's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series, which opens with an extended sequence filling in the backstory of the antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron.

Of course, this isn't his entire backstory. The Rings of Power takes place during an interim age; the previous dark lord, Morgoth, was vanquished, and Sauron was seemingly destroyed. We know that our heroes are destined to feud with Sauron and destroy him yet again so that he can ultimately return to power a third time during the better-known events of The Lord of the Rings films. As such, this all feels a bit tedious. Sauron's conflict with Adar, the mysterious leader of the orcs, does not have particularly high stakes: We know definitively that Sauron will eventually beat out all the other bad guys, which include a dark wizard who seems suspiciously similar to—but is not, I don't think?—Saruman, the rival of Gandalf. (At least, it would be very weird to have Saruman already being evil.)

I am enjoying the performance of Charlie Vickers, the actor who portrays Sauron. And the storyline involving the Stranger—who is presumably young Gandalf—and his hobbit-like companions has an entertaining, whimsical quality. The rest of the show is a tad boring. The actors who portray Galadriel and Elrond have not imbued these characters with nearly enough vibrancy. (Though anyone would seem inadequately bad when compared with Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving.) The dwarf scenes are extremely dull, bordering on unwatchable. I am only two episodes in, and so far there hasn't been much else.