The Ballot and the Bullet Against Trump

In the immediate aftermath of the near-miss, but-for-the-grace-of-God attempt on Donald Trump’s life this weekend, many pundits and politicians on the Left felt compelled to moderate or soften their tone — at least briefly. President Biden — or more accurately, President Biden’s aides — put out a brief, curt statement calling for America to “unite as one nation to condemn” the attack, and paused ads and events for his re-election campaign.

Kamala Harris published a similarly blasé statement declaring that “assassination attempts have no place in our nation, or anywhere.” Miraculously, Pelosi herself somehow found a way to make the attack about her: “As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society,” the former House Democrat Speaker announced on X.

But even in their ostensible condemnations, many progressives just couldn’t help themselves. Variations of the phrase “beat him with ballots, not bullets” bounced around the left-wing punditrosphere but often with various caveats or amendments: “Trump remains an existential threat to democracy,” wrote Star Trek actor-turned-left-wing-personality George Takei. “We’ll defeat him with ballots, not bullets.” (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Whither ‘America First’?)

While “political violence is ALWAYS wrong,” added the Never-Trump commentator Joe Walsh, “Trump is a direct threat to democracy & the rule of law.” Former Republican congressman and anti-Trump hysteric Adam Kinzinger reminded his viewers that “Trump is a danger to democracy — he absolutely is,” and urged them to “keep fighting this fight, but let’s fight it politically, obviously.”

In this morning’s newsletter, titled “Bullets Can’t Save Liberalism,” The Bulwark intoned: “While Trump’s embrace of political violence, alleged criminal behavior, and attempts to short-circuit our elections present a grave threat to the liberal order, they are not the only threat against it.”

These mental gymnastics routines were, admittedly, predictable: Those who have staked their careers on hystericizing about Trump as a harbinger of imminent fascism were never going to relinquish their paychecks that easily.

But the obvious questions remain unanswered: If Trump really was an existential, unprecedented threat to democracy, why wouldn’t any and all means of preventing his rise be justified? If Trump really was on the cusp of a thousand-year Reich, why shouldn’t Americans stop at nothing to stop him? If Trump really was going to end America as we know it if given the chance to win an election, what reason is there to give him that chance in the first place?

In The Atlantic, David Frum — yet another grizzled veteran of Never-Trumpism — exemplified this morbidly amusing contradiction with a Sunday essay titled: “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator.” (Subtitle: “Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others”). “The attempted murder of Trump — and the killing of a person nearby — is a horror and an outrage,” Frum declared, before going on to devote thousands of words to painting a picture of Trump that would lead any reasonable reader (and a good deal of unreasonable ones) to the precise opposite conclusion.

“The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien,” Frum moaned. “It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him.” And yet, “those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable — and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”

For years, Trump’s opponents have warned that his rhetoric would (and did) lead to real-world violence. The standard never has been — and never will be — applied in the other direction.

For all the talk of Trump as a would-be totalitarian, a fascist threat to all that is good and decent and holy, or “an insurrectionist against the American state,” to use Frum’s formulation.

For all the grave warnings that his return to power would be the most catastrophic event in world history, bringing with it unspeakable horrors, barbarities, mass death, locusts, plagues, and more; for all the desperate entreaties that all decent Americans must do whatever is necessary to prevent this would-be tyrant from clawing his way into power; the very voices that spent the past nine years pouring these poisons into the ears of Americans are now shocked that somebody opted to take them to their logical conclusion — and outraged at the suggestion that their rhetoric may have played a role.

Words are not, contrary to popular belief, “violence.” The First Amendment stands alone, even in the Western world, as a guarantor — despite its beleaguered condition — of a far greater sphere of liberty in the realm of speech than any other nation on Earth, and we should hope it stays that way.

But if what is good for the goose is good for the gander, then the prominent voices who used their not-insubstantial platforms to accuse Trump and his allies of “stochastic terrorism” are as (frankly, more) responsible for what happened this weekend as any right-wing politician has ever been for an act of right-wing political violence.

Any other conclusion defies all laws of reason. What is the correct response to something like terrorism? Good arguments? “Beating them at the ballot box”? Of course not. The correct response to terrorism is a swift, uncompromising, overwhelming use of retaliatory violent force. (READ MORE: Anarcho-Tyranny Is Official White House Policy)

For nearly a decade now, nearly every major messaging and narrative-shaping institution in this country has whipped their readers and listeners into a state of perpetual hysteria with breathless fever-dream fantasies of the great orange evil — a larger-than-life supervillain who would, if ever given the chance, take away everything that they held dear. As it turns out, some people may have actually believed them.

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