This is how you get escalation

Roughly two hours after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blamed President Joe Biden.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance, the odds-on favorite to be Trump’s vice president, wrote on X formerly known as Twitter).

Vance was not alone. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote that “Democrats wanted this to happen.” Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said something similar. So did Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).

All of this happened Saturday night, before we knew a single thing about the shooter’s identity or motive. Since then, the Secret Service has identified him as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, and we still don’t know much about his motive.

Federal data shows he gave $15 to a progressive PAC in 2021, but more recent Pennsylvania voter records list him as a registered Republican. A classmate told local news that he was a bullied loner who frequently wore “hunting” outfits to school. None of these crumbs establish why he might have targeted the former president, and so far no one has found any online accounts under Crooks’s name that could help make sense of his actions.

So we can be confident that none of this speculation was even remotely connected to the facts at the time it happened. Prominent Republicans were conjuring up a Democratic boogeyman, all but openly telling their supporters that Biden and his allies were behind the attack on Trump’s life. 

That’s dangerous. Very, very dangerous. And it should cause us to reflect more broadly on how our political leaders should respond to political violence in our country.

When is blaming leaders for violence appropriate?

On one level, what Republicans are saying might seem to make sense. Research on political violence does suggest that, when leaders call for violence or condone it, they create a permission structure for their angriest and most deranged supporters. 

Democrats have used this logic to blame Republicans for political violence in the past. After the 2022 shooting at a supermarket in a majority-Black area of Buffalo, Democrats rushed to blame Republicans who had been promoting the idea of a “Great Replacement” of whites by non-whites. Later that year, Democrats also blamed heated Republican attacks on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the assault on her husband Paul Pelosi.

But there’s a critical difference between those cases and the present one: evidence.

The Buffalo shooter penned a detailed manifesto explaining how replacement theory motivated his actions; his motives were known by the night of the attack. In the days after the Pelosi assault, Democrats cited revelations about the attacker’s Facebook page and his stated opinions to justify their claims.

At present, no similar evidence exists linking Biden’s rhetoric to Crooks’s actions. 

Such evidence could indeed come to light. While right-wing political violence is far more common in the contemporary United States, there are recent examples of violence coming from the other side — most notably in 2017, when an angry left-winger opened fire at the GOP House baseball team’s practice and seriously injured House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA). 

But the question is not whether Democratic rhetoric might have played a role in the shooting; it’s whether it actually did. At present, there’s simply nothing justifying the speculation coming from folks like Vance.

In this sense, the Republican behavior recalls a different — and less defensible — response from Democrats to political violence.

When Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in 2011, liberals and Democrats rushed to blame the attack on a graphic released by former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s PAC. The graphic highlighted with a bullseye the names of Democrats they hoped to defeat. Republicans argued that this is absurd: The bullseye was used to signal that they were “targeting” particular candidates electorally rather than with literal violence.

Subsequent evidence has supported the Republican line. Giffords’s attacker, Jared Lee Loughner, was a man with mental illness who abused substances and had no clear political views. He had become dangerously obsessed with Giffords after a brief interaction at a 2007 constituent meet-and-greet and plotted her assassination for reasons comprehensible only to him.

Democrats should not have been speculating about Republican culpability before they had any evidence to back up their claims. It was irresponsible and politically inflammatory, a case study in how not to respond to an assassination attempt on an elected official under conditions of uncertainty.

Yet Republicans are now repeating that mistake at a much more politically charged time.

Pouring gasoline on a fire

In libel law, truth is an absolute defense: you can’t be held legally responsible for damaging someone’s reputation if what you’re saying is actually true.

The same should hold true for Democrats’ rhetoric about Trump. Donald Trump really is a threat to democracy. He tried to overturn the 2020 election, incited a riot at the US Capitol, and is currently putting forward a 2025 policy agenda that could place dangerous amounts of power in his personal hands. Democrats not only should say that; they also have an obligation to voters to make it the centerpiece of their case.

In fact, it’s the parlous state of American democracy that makes the Republican response to Trump’s shooting so dangerous.

Trump dominates the Republican Party because a critical mass of the party’s base really, really hates Democrats. They believe that the Democratic Party is out to get them and destroy their way of life, and are willing to entrust power to a cruel demagogue in order to defeat the left. A small portion of this base believes this so deeply that they’re willing to commit actual violence in order to stop Democrats.

How else to describe the events of January 6?

In such a moment, blaming Democrats without evidence for the attempt on Trump’s life is extraordinarily dangerous. It’s waving a red flag in front of the most radical Republicans, directing their attention toward a target and outlet for their rage.

This would remain true even if evidence emerges that Trump’s attacker was a left-winger. When your rhetoric carries potentially serious consequences, you have a moral obligation to be especially careful in deploying it. Speculating wildly under such tense circumstances is wrong, even if the speculation is eventually vindicated by future revelations.

What Vance et al. are doing is beyond irresponsible. It is pouring a bucket of gasoline on a campfire and hoping that the forest doesn’t burn.