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Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. That was true before an assassination attempt was foiled at his golf course Sunday, and it remains true after. Political violence in general, and assassinating presidential candidates specifically, also poses risks to democracy.
There is no contradiction between these ideas whatsoever. Yet Trump’s supporters have responded to both attempts on his life by muddying the waters, exploiting the near-tragedies with cynical efforts to redefine critiques of Trump’s authoritarian inclinations as violent provocation.
In the wake of the news from Florida, Trump defenders began spreading this line reflexively. Conservative commentator Ben Domenech: “The commentariat insists on owning zero consequences for their constant repetition that Trump is an existential threat whose election will bring bloody fascism, when it’s absolutely obvious it motivated this would-be assassin.” Miranda Devine in the New York Post: “Reckless rhetoric from Dems and media to blame for second Trump assassination attempt.”
Moderates and liberals, who correctly believe in upholding democratic norms, especially nonviolence, might be tempted to understand these arguments as a species of principle. But the effort to rule criticism of Trump’s authoritarianism as dangerous and out of bounds is not motivated by or related to any defense of democracy or nonviolence. It is a purely cynical attempt to foam the runway for the election of a dangerous man.
The Trumpist argument has a thin veneer of plausibility: If people think a candidate is a threat to democracy, some of them will try to murder him. “What happens when you continually demonize someone as ‘Hitler,’ insist that he is ‘a dictator’ and ‘a threat to democracy?’” asks Roger Kimball, “Why, you get chaps like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two months ago.”
But this is not an accurate factual description of either assassination attempt. Republicans claimed immediately following the first attempt against Trump that Crooks was a partisan Democrat, exploiting the long lag between the shooting and the investigation that ultimately concluded he simply wanted to murder a famous presidential candidate and deemed Trump an easier target. The second shooter, Ryan Wesley Routh, has veered wildly across the political spectrum and is, as Politico summarized his strange conglomeration of passions, “a long-troubled man with wildly swinging political beliefs.”
There is a more serious conceptual problem with the argument that denouncing Trump as a threat to democracy inspired violence: It ignores the truth or falsity of the matter. Taken at face value, the argument implies that we cannot say a presidential candidate threatens democracy even if he plainly does. A party could nominate a candidate who openly promises to end elections and imprison all his critics, and the opposing party would be prevented from describing this candidate as a threat to democracy for fear of inspiring assassination attempts.
That would be a strangely self-defeating application of democratic norms. As it happens, this is not the principle conservatives are advocating.
Rather than claiming that it’s dangerous to call a candidate a threat to democracy regardless of whether it’s true, they are insisting that Trump is not a threat to democracy. They are further insisting that the Democrats are a threat to democracy.
Numerous conservatives have responded to the Sunday incidents by reminding their audience of Trump’s remarks from the debate, which they treat as prophetic. What Trump said was, “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy. I’m a threat to democracy. They’re the threat to democracy.”
The very remarks they are citing include Trump calling his opponents a threat to democracy gives the game away. The fact that they’re proud of this line, rather than embarrassed by it, reveals the utter lack of principle behind it. “What will it take for these demented partisans to lower the temperature?” demands Devine with a comical lack of self-awareness.
As it happens, the Kamala Harris campaign has made a tactical decision to deemphasize the Trumpian threat to democracy in its campaign rhetoric. One result of this calculation is that Trump’s rhetoric against Harris is far more hysterical than the claims being made against him. He is describing her as a communist, insisting she would destroy the country, and otherwise not even pretending to uphold the notion of lowering the temperature he briefly feigned last summer.
And so, when they are casting about for examples of leading Democrats supposedly inspiring assassination attempts, Trumpists have found little material to work with. The best grist they could seize upon yesterday was a tweet by Hakeem Jeffries opposing Trump’s stance on abortion. Here is Kimball’s indignant summary:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted this incitement on X:
Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025.
We must stop them.
Stop them how, exactly, Hakeem?”
Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway called Jeffries’s tweet “eliminationist rhetoric.” (The Federalist recently published an article calling for ABC News to be criminally charged for its unfair treatment of Mr. Trump at the presidential debate.)
The Trumpist notion that any political or journalistic activity disadvantageous to Trump is a form of subversion is itself evidence of his authoritarianism. Trump has advocated for this idea consistently since his appearance on the political scene, describing all of his opponents as criminals, denouncing peaceful protesters as mobs, and calling any reporting he dislikes “election interference.” He does this so routinely it barely even attracts notice anymore. In recent weeks he bizarrely claimed Harris was using artificial intelligence to fake the appearance of a crowd at her rally and demanding her disqualification (“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE”). He has said criticizing judges who issue favorable rulings for him ought to be a crime (“Playing the ref with our judges and justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that”). Needless to say, Trump does not believe it should be a crime for him to denounce judges who make rulings of which he disapproves.
In recent days, Trump has been telling wild lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These inflammatory claims have resulted directly in bomb threats that have forced the closings of schools and community events. Asked this weekend to denounce the bomb threats, Trump characteristically refused:
Reporter: Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield?
Trump: I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was a beautiful town, and now they’re going through hell. Not going to happen with me, I can tell you.
Supporting liberal democracy requires simultaneously affirming the right to engage in legal, peaceful activity while opposing violent and criminal actions. Trump upholds neither side of the equation. He considers all speech or political activity against him to be criminal and any activity on his behalf, whether or not it is illegal or violent, to be legitimate. He believes all these things because he is an authoritarian at heart. The impulse to stop his critics from accurately describing his political project is not a defense of democratic norms but the precise opposite.
