Do Liberals Really Need to “Tone Down the Rhetoric”?

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MAX WOLFF-MEROVICK: Since the assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump, outspoken conservatives have publicly lamented what they characterize as unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric from the left. Figures from Matt Walsh to Piers Morgan have derided liberal critics of Trump as overly divisive, pointing to descriptions of the former president as fascist, anti-American, and even like Hitler. According to this narrative, it is the responsibility of liberal commentators to simply “tone down the rhetoric.” As Trump himself has claimed, harsh words from Democrats inspire malevolent actors to take initiative in dangerous ways, and we ought to be careful to prevent it from happening again.

While perhaps intuitively appealing, a closer look at this argument reveals that it lacks substance. The first issue is that there is little evidence actually connecting liberal rhetoric to the shooters’ motives. Intelligence agencies have yet to conclude any official motives for either Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh, and from the little evidence made available to the public, it’s hard to squarely lay blame one way or the other. 

Crooks reportedly leaned right, made a one-time donation to Democratic organization ActBlue on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, then registered as a Republican voter months afterward. 

Routh voted for Trump in 2016, but later became disillusioned with him based on his foreign policy with respect to Iran. Vehemently pro-Ukraine, he voted in the Democratic primary while also expressing support for a potential Haley-Ramaswamy ticket in 2024. 

Nothing in the fact pattern for either of these would-be assassins indicates that they were in any capacity inspired by rhetoric criticizing Trump for his behavior on January 6th, as conservatives would have you believe. 

But even if neither shooter specifically cited comments comparing Trump to Hitler as their inspiration, perhaps it could be argued that such statements contributed to an inflamed political environment that generally facilitated the radicalization of the two men. After all, a concerned citizen observing an ever-escalatory rhetorical battle might be driven to extreme action, regardless of the specific proximal verbiage. However, it’s difficult to blame Democrats for two main reasons. 

Firstly, conservatives have done little to mitigate the pervasive and unhinged messaging coming from their own party. Seventy percent of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, while the former president’s jokes about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi were met with a stunning silence from his party. In contrast, Democrats at all levels of government were quick to condemn both assassination attempts on the former President, and a few state representatives who made inflammatory remarks quickly walked them back after backlash. No such standards appear to exist for the current GOP nominee. For conservatives to now turn around and request that Democrats stop “stoking the flames” is hypocritical at best and implausible at worst.

The second reason that it’s hard to blame Democrats is that the rhetoric they employ doesn’t stray particularly far from the reality they’re using it to describe. One phrase that conservatives take issue with is “threat to democracy”—if Trump really poses a threat to democracy, according to these figures, doesn’t that justify preventing him from taking power again by any means necessary? Well, no. Months before either assassination attempt took place, for instance, Joe Biden made use of the anti-democracy criticism of Trump to underscore the importance of voting in the 2024 election while making sure to condemn all forms of political violence. 

Overall though, the problem for conservatives here is that the implied prescription—that Democrats should stop describing Trump as a threat to democracy—requires justification beyond just the fact that it’s extreme. After all, if Trump is, in fact, a threat to democracy, there exists an obligation to call him out as such. 

And the case for such a claim is compelling. It is largely undisputed at this point that in the wake of the 2020 election, Trump made unprecedented efforts to overturn the results based on false claims of voter fraud. He helped orchestrate a plot to send votes from fraudulent slates of electors in hopes that Mike Pence would arbitrarily choose to count them on January 6th. He pressured the DOJ to release statements falsely stating they had found evidence of widespread election fraud. And on the day the election was being certified, he directed a mob of protestors to the Capitol and sat by for three hours while they chanted in favor of hanging Mike Pence and attacking lawmakers. To this day, Trump denies he lost the election, and on Tuesday stated that he remains skeptical of the electoral system going into the 2024 process.

While I don’t personally believe they hold much water, there are counterarguments to these claims. There are conversations to be had here. But at the very least, Democrats calling Trump a threat to democracy isn’t especially far-fetched. So no, liberals shouldn’t “tone down the rhetoric”—Trump should instead tone down the action. If the former president hadn’t called to terminate the Constitution or claimed he would be a dictator on day one, he would probably have fewer people calling him a fascist. 

As President Joe Biden has repeatedly affirmed, there is zero place for political violence in this country. But until conservatives reconcile their deep-seated vitriol for US institutions and hold their own party accountable to the standards they promote, Democrats and their rhetoric are not the ones to blame for it.

Max Wolff-Merovick is a staff writer from California. He is a first-year in the School of Foreign Service interested in economics and politics.