Heated rhetoric as Republicans blame Biden for Trump shooting

WASHINGTON – Within hours of

the assassination attempt on Donald Trump,

his Republican supporters in Congress claimed they knew exactly who was responsible: Mr Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Mr Biden’s campaign “rhetoric led directly to president Trump’s attempted assassination,” Senator J.D. Vance, on Trump’s shortlist for vice-president, alleged shortly after July 13’s shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which the former US leader was wounded and one bystander killed.

Mr Vance’s comments were part of an escalating chorus of Republicans who have pinned the blame on Democrats – even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it has yet to identify the shooter’s ideology.

They also heap more fuel onto the fire in a political atmosphere that has long been tense and fiercely polarised.

“Heated rhetoric has come from both sides” in recent years, political science professor Michael Bailey of Georgetown University told AFP.

Republicans, for whom gun rights and a rejection of alleged government overreach are key themes, “have been more prone to marry such rhetoric with imagery related to guns”, Professor Bailey noted.

“And some of them (including Trump) did not cover themselves in glory when they made light of the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband,” he said, referring to the 2022 attack by a conspiracy theorist on the high-profile Democrat’s spouse.

Trump later mocked the Pelosis, and stoked further conspiracy theories around the assault.

Biden ‘sent the orders’

Mr Steve Scalise, a Republican who was shot in a 2017 attack

on conservative lawmakers by a left-wing activist, has also blamed the left for July 13’s assassination attempt.

“Democrat leaders have been fuelling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” he said.

“For years, and even today, leftist activists, Democrat donors and now even Joe Biden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita charged on X.

Mr Biden did recently tell donors that it was “time to put Trump in the bullseye”, according to comments put out by his campaign – though he was speaking in the context of focusing the party on beating Trump.

Representative Mike Collins went further on the shooting, stating “Joe Biden sent the orders”, without offering credible evidence.

Such accusations risk removing “attention from the very welcome, widespread condemnation of the attack”, said Mr Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

America ‘needs to stop’

Mr Biden, speaking from the White House earlier on July 14, called unity “the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is more important than that right now”.

Trump and Mr Biden have spoken to each other after the incident, while Mr Biden’s campaign is temporarily pausing television advertisements – part of what some on both sides hope is part of a broader national cooling.

“Tensions are high on both sides, and I think we’ve got to tone down the rhetoric,” 60-year-old Trump supporter Martin Kutzler told AFP in downtown Milwaukee, where the Republican convention is set to open on July 15.

Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley meanwhile declined to speculate on the shooting while speaking to Fox News Sunday.

“Right now, I think everybody in America needs to stop. They need to pause,” he said.

Among elected officials, though, the accusations keep coming.

“When the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy, and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Depoliticising the shooting, however, is essential, Prof Bailey said.

“In an environment with so many guns... it is possible for heated rhetoric to motivate an unbalanced person on any side.” AFP