Our heated political rhetoric is making us bitter

By Matthew Gagnon

“We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” 

That statement was made by Joe Biden in a call to donors nearly two weeks ago, as he sought to put questions surrounding his candidacy to rest, and move forward with the campaign. 

Several days later on Saturday, July 13, a gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. 

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, statements like Biden’s and other more incendiary comments from Democrats gained renewed attention and some began to blame them for the attempt on Trump’s life. 

Particularly noteworthy was left-wing voices comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler, and suggestions that Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. Left-wing magazine The New Republic published a cover story entitled “American Fascism,” that was accompanied by a photo of Trump with a “Hitler mustache.” The Washington Post published a column by Mike Godwin saying that “it was okay to compare Trump to Hitler.”

In a November appearance on former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show, Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman stated that Trump’s rhetoric was “getting dangerous,” and decided that it was appropriate and not at all hypocritical to close the interview by saying “he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated.” 

Hillary Clinton appeared on an episode of ABC’s “The View” late last year, and said that there were examples in other countries of people getting “legitimately elected” who would then work “to do away with elections and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.” She then brought up the ubiquitous Hitler reference, noting that he got “legitimately elected,” before clearly stating that Trump intends to follow in those wicked footsteps. 

Sensing the political danger of being associated with this type of hyperbolic extravagance in the wake of an assassination attempt, Biden was quick to distance himself from this type of statement, and call for a cooling down of rhetoric, saying that political rhetoric has gotten “very heated” in a nationally televised address. 

This is, of course, rich coming from one of the chief purveyors of overheated rhetoric. To be on the receiving end of lectures from Biden, or really anyone in the Democratic Party, about the state of extreme rhetoric in this country is the very definition of throwing stones in a glass house. 

With that said, his statement, hypocritical as it may be, isn’t wrong. America is addicted to extreme, ridiculously over-the-top rhetoric and overly emotional, panic-laden paranoia about their political opponents. It needs to be dialed back, though it very obviously will not be. 

The question, though, is whether this kind of rhetoric is responsible for political violence, and whether it is inciting incidents like the failed Trump assassination attempt. 

Today, Republicans (and plenty of independents) say that it is after connecting the things said about Trump to the shooting. But yesterday it was exactly the reverse.

In 2011, then U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords was tragically shot in Tucson in an attack that killed six people and injured 15 others. In the aftermath of the shooting, the top trending question on the social media network Facebook was whether Sarah Palin was to blame for the shooting, and left-wing voices all over the country were answering “yes.”

The narrative didn’t go away with the benefit of time and a dampening of emotions. In 2017, six years later, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “America’s Lethal Politics,” about the shooting of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and others at a congressional baseball game. The editorial again placed the blame for Gifford’s shooting, with no evidence, at the feet of Palin supposedly engaging in “heated political rhetoric.” The editorial originally stated that “the link to political incitement was clear” between Palin’s map and the attack on Giffords, a statement which needed to be retracted and became a centerpoint of Palin’s defamation suit against The Times. 

In all of these examples, the connection between supposedly overheated political rhetoric and violence is non-existent. While it is natural to blame the cheap and irresponsible statements made by politicians and their supporters for violent acts, the responsibility rests with the perpetrator.

People can find all kinds of justifications, real or imagined, for committing violent acts. President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinkley Jr. attacked the president to impress actress Jodi Foster, and there was not one but two near-miss attempts made on the life of Gerald Ford, one of the most inoffensively vanilla politicians in modern times.

Our rhetoric should calm down, it is true. But not because it is inspiring violence, but rather because it is making our politics intolerably bitter and unhealthy.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.