COMPARE AND CONTRAST

 

Another assassination attempt was made against presidential candidate Donald Trump last Sunday when an armed, mentally unstable person camped out at his golf resort, waiting for him.  Thankfully the man was stopped with him ever firing a shot.  This is, of course, the second such attempt made against Trump during this campaign, and an investigation into just how two such dangerous people could have gotten so close to him is understandably, underway.

Trump has, not surprisingly,  blamed what he called the "inflammatory rhetoric"  from Democrats, as has his running mate, JD Vance.  In a classic burst of Trump hypocrisy, Trump used the exact kind of language that he was condemning to describe his political opponents, calling them the “enemy from within” and “the real threat.”  But what do you expect from a man who says that if he loses we "won't have a country anymore", calls his opponents "vermin" and says that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of America." 

Sadly, I could go on much further when listing the violence tinged, hateful words that Trump and his supporters regularly use on the campaign trail or in social media.  But what I want to do instead is to compare and contrast the reaction to this attack, and another violent. politically based one.

In October of 2022, just before the midterm elections, a mentally disturbed man, armed with a hammer, broke into the home of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and brutally attacked her husband.  While he eventually recovered,  he had to spend days in the hospital with a cracked skull. The attacker was obsessed with online rightwing conspiracy theories.

And what was the response of Donald Trump to such a vicious attack?  He made jokes.  He repeatedly made sick jokes during speeches about the attack that had left an innocent man hospitalized.  And he didn't stop, he still joked about it this very month while giving a speech in front of fraternal police officers, saying, "Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn't help too much with the problems she had, did it?" (Thankfully, witnesses described the joke as only getting a few awkward laughs).  And it wasn't just Trump, ridicule of the attack and conspiracy theories about Pelosi and his attacker being lovers, spread throughout  right wing media.  While this attack was obviously different than an assassination attempt made against a presidential candidate, they are both politically based, potentially deadly attacks made by mentally unstable men.

Compare that cruel response by Trump to President Joe Biden's about the recent  attempt on Trump himself:  Neither he nor anyone connected to the Kamala Harris campaign have in any way downplayed the seriousness of what happened, and Biden strongly condemned political violence and called for more government aid for the Secret Service.  And while some radical people on the left have made sick jokes about the assassination attempt on social media, no mainstream political figure on the left has embraced any anti Trump conspiracies or said anything to condone what happened.  The notion that it is people on the left that are using violent language, or even that both sides do it, is just a false equivalency.  

I myself often use strong language when describing my deep loathing of Donald Trump and the political cult movement that he represents, but naturally I draw the line at condoning violence.  My hope is that Trump will lose the election in November and then go to jail for the multiple crimes I think he has committed.  In fact, I think Trump has been engaging in lawless behavior for years and should have gone to jail for it long before he got into politics.  (I especially believe those 26 women that have accused him of sexual assault or rape, and those accusations stretch back decades.)  I can think all of these things and still be repulsed by the assassination attempts made against him.