Less than two months ago, Donald Trump was nearly killed on live television. Amazingly, this extraordinary story has already been memory-holed. Among the mainstream news, there is shockingly little curiosity about what the perpetrator believed, his motives, and how he was able to nearly kill a leading presidential candidate.
This attack followed years of extreme rhetoric against Trump, describing him as a unique threat to democracy, claims accompanied by unprecedented criminal prosecutions and civil suits, which collectively aim to force him out of the race and otherwise ruin his life.
In the wake of the shooting and Trump’s miraculous survival, there was a brief moment of bipartisan magnanimity. In the immediate aftermath, President Biden said, “I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally . . . There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.”
He added later, “It’s sick. It’s sick. That’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. You cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”
This was all very welcome, and Biden was not alone. People across the spectrum condemned the shooting. It was a wake-up call. Regardless of one’s personal politics, most people recognized that it would have been a disaster for the country if Trump had been killed. In addition to being the most violent and extreme type of election interference, it would have fueled, with some basis in reality, a lot of suspicion and hostility on the right about conspiracies involving the Deep State.
In addition to widespread concern over the Secret Service’s poor performance, many recognized that both sides of the political spectrum bore some risk from their violent fringe and that political rhetoric from the mainstream had an influence on this fringe. In other words, what happened was not confined either to Trump haters or extremist Trump supporters. Neither side has a monopoly on this type of dangerous, illegal behavior.
Once upon a time, the left gave birth to the Weather Underground and, more recently, the Antifa mobs of 2020. For the right, there was Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City Bombing almost 30 years ago and the Oakland “boogaloo” shooters in 2020.
It appeared briefly that political rhetoric might be toned down on both sides. But after a period of calm and a superficially patriotic convention, the Democrats are turning up the rhetorical heat again. I am not sure if it is happening because of declining internal poll numbers or maybe it’s just habit, but there’s a noticeable change.
For example, a recent ad describes Trump, in the words of the New Republic, as a “Crazed, Corrupt Dictator Seeking ‘Revenge.’”
At the DNC, amid the flag-waving and praise for the community, one speaker after another had pure venom for Trump and his supporters. For them, he is the apotheosis of evil: divisive, dishonest, racist, sexist, selfish, venal, a draft dodger, greedy, and all the rest.
Finally, in the biggest broad-based attack on essentially every Trump supporter, Biden gave his infamous speech in Philadelphia in 2022 on the evils of “MAGA Republicans.” He pulled no punches and went after Trump’s supporters in addition to Trump himself. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election . . . They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”
These words from the president and his supporters do not precisely call for violence. But they do attack their opponents’ right to rule if Trump somehow wins a majority of the votes.
To make an analogy, while I think most of the rhetoric about the events of January 6 is exaggerated, I also thought at the time that the whole thing was irresponsible and a self-own. I said, “The Capitol protest will continue to do more harm than good, not least because it was tainted by violence. While Trump is not legally responsible for violence done by his supporters, his post-election rhetoric and calls for a march on the Capitol led his supporters into a trap. These people believed that somehow, if they were numerous and energetic enough, their efforts and their presence would have to change the results. This is not how things work.”
While not an explicit call for violence, calling an election stolen—or its opposite, calling Trump’s 2016 election the product of Russian collusion—is extremely provocative. If the election was in fact stolen, the government lacks legitimacy. If the government lacks legitimacy, then our country’s revolutionary political origins suggest it may be overthrown. Similarly, if a president is actually a Manchurian Candidate, colluding with and doing the bidding of a hostile foreign power, it suggests all the federal officers and workers who took an oath to the Constitution can disregard and resist him.
A few small changes would likely do a lot to add to social peace. For starters, the whole country should adopt election best practices, like paper ballots that remain with the machines, the provision of government ID by voters, and counting all votes on or before election day. This leads to a verifiable, swift, and bipartisan ascent to the results.
As it stands, there is no way to audit most elections or even conduct an efficient recount in many jurisdictions, as we saw with the long post-election counts in 2020. It is as if Florida’s “hanging chad” problem of 2000 has now been purposely repeated elsewhere in the name of maximum access to accommodate the most disorganized and procrastinating of voters.
Second, particularly among high-level candidates, both sides should err on the side of calling opponents mistaken, ineffective, or simply possessed of different values, rather than as evil liars or threats to democracy. Everyone overdoes it in this department from time to time, of course, and I don’t mean to downplay the stakes, as I think this election is very important. But after a smoke-filled room removal of Joe Biden from the running and the recent near-assassination of Donald Trump, other considerations besides victory should have some weight among everyone who considers himself a patriot.
It does not look like this is going to happen. The Democrats hate Trump with a white-hot passion I have never seen before, even against Reagan or George W. Bush at the height of the Iraq War. Perhaps Nixon was on that level, and they did run him out of office.
I also don’t think both sides are identical in this regard. While Biden became a hated figure after the COVID mandates of 2021 and his MAGA Republicans’ speech, Republicans seem more amused by Kamala Harris, dismissing her merely as a bit inauthentic and in way over her head.
This makes sense. Harris lacks the aggressive personality of Hilary Clinton or the charisma of Barack Obama, so people who oppose her are not as inspired by enmity as they were in 2016. I think people realize that her historical candidacy, if successful, would lead to very unhistorical changes in policy and performance. Instead, she would almost certainly ratify the business-as-usual committee governance that characterized the Biden administration.
There’s time for a wide range of very bad things to happen between now and election day and, for the good of the country, we should all pray they do not happen. Politics is important, as is our president, but the country has some enduring qualities that should be protected in a way that weathers the storm regardless of the result.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
Where to start on this horrible article. For starters, Mr. Roach’s moral equivalence between Democrats and Republicans is both shameful and erroneous in the extreme.
Sure, there are extremes within each political party, but to draw equivalence between them is journalistic malpractice. Republicans do not use–with either the frequency, in tenor or in the sheer numbers–the kinds of heated, over-the-top rhetoric that Democrats do. And for Mr. Roach to infer so is abhorrent.
Second, let’s remember that Democrats are the party of castrating and sexually mutilating young children in the name of “gender affirmation”. If that is not the very definition of evil, I don’t know what is. Yet, its the Democrats who claim that Trump and his followers are “evil” for their heinous beliefs in God, the Constitution, in merit in employment, and equality (not equity), and in a limited, functioning government that is not weaponized against any group or political party.
Somehow, the Democrats see such beliefs as radical and inimical to good government and a civilized, sane society. And Mr. Roach plays right into this insanity by creating a false equivalence between left and right. As anyone who has been paying attention knows, it is the left–the Democrats–who have been pushing the pendulum of extremism to its eventual apex.
It is the Democrats who are responsible for dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage during the summer of 2020 due to the unfortunate death (not murder, death by fentanyl overdose) of a black career criminal and all round thug. It is Democrats who–in great numbers–consistently and egregiously use the most inflammatory language possible with near impunity, but lose their minds when some lone, outlier conservative or Republican dares to match them. Yet Mr. Roach sees equivalence in this absurd mismatch.
But for me, the coups de grace of editorial madness was this statement:
If the election was in fact stolen, the government lacks legitimacy. If the government lacks legitimacy, then our country’s revolutionary political origins suggest it may be overthrown.
There are mountains of evidence the 2020 election was in fact stolen, yet Mr. Roach somehow infers he is either unaware of, or unknowledgeable of such a thing. PDJT was not advising, encouraging or advocating the overthrow of the government due to the stolen election of 2020 (although he was well within his right to do so), But Trump WAS advocating for an examination of the great many statistical anomalies and grotesque voting irregularities before congress certified the winner–as per Constitutional prescription. That is the whole reason John Eastman was advising Trump–to provide for a legal, Constitutionally valid path for, if not reversing the stolen election, then at least revealing to the American public the illegitimacy of the incoming government.
So yes, the government that took control in 2020 was–and is–illegitimate, yet no one took up arms against it. But does Mr. Roach doubt that if the Democrats had lost (especially through industrial-scale election chicanery) the election, that they would have shown the kind of reticence and discretion We the People have? Seriously?
Mr. Roach used to be one of my favorite AG authors. His incoherent missive causes me to rethink my regard.
Thanks. I am far too busy today to respond to this piece. Of course a response had to be posted. You saved me from having to do that.
BTW you also did a good job. Maybe not as well as I would have done but close
This is a rebuttal we’d run.
Nothing on the conservative side has come close to what Democrats and their supporters have done since Trump went down the golden escalator. Is the author aware that their behavior shows preemptive anger over their potential loss of this election? Anyone who tries to take political power from any Democrat is the “apotheosis of evil,” and they never accept the result of any election that didn’t go their way. Have Republicans ever killed people, looted and burned inner city areas over the anticipated loss of an election? Democrats are again showing their preemptive anger in the latest iteration of their Trump Derangement Syndrome, rhetoric which is so extreme that it backs up the diagnosis that they are not normal. Their lies are a form of hate speech and warn people of what they’ll do if they lose this election.