![\"Vance](\"https:\/\/d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net\/img\/c800x450-w800-q60\/uploads\/2024\/09\/sipaphotostwenty335378-800x450.jpg\")
<\/picture> <\/div>\nHaving 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.)<\/p>\n
“He believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump told<\/a> Fox News\u2014referencing 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\u2014both from the inside and out.”<\/p>\n Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R\u2013Ohio), has said similar things.<\/p>\n “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<\/a> Vance. “I think that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.”<\/p>\n It’s true that the other side increasingly talks about Trump in apocalyptic terms: a\u00a0threat to democracy<\/a>, fascist<\/a>, Hitler<\/a>, etc. But Trump’s own rhetoric is often quite inflammatory. He’s called<\/a> Harris a Marxist, a communist, and, for good measure, a fascist. And back when he was a prominent Never Trumper, Vance himself called Trump<\/a> every awful name in the book.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> the right for inspiring the shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D\u2013Ariz.). It’s demoralizing to see Trump and Vance easily succumb to the temptation to do the exact same thing.<\/p>\n 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\u2014politically-motivated hatred<\/a> is a component of shockingly few crimes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\nThis Week on Free Media<\/h1>\n