The blood on former President Donald Trump’s face was barely dry before calls to “take down the temperature” and “unite” began rolling in from Democrats and their courtesans in the press.
President Biden issued a statement after the assassination attempt Saturday evening calling for unity, as did Vice President Kamala Harris and scores of other Democrats. Even the clueless and cowardly Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson got in on the unity wave, saying, “We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down, we’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country.”
Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. There can be no unity with people and institutions who have spent years whipping the left into a violent frenzy over Trump. This goes for Democrats and the corporate media alike.
President Biden has spent the last few years declaring over and over that Trump is a “threat to democracy.” Some are outraged about Biden’s recent call with donors when he said it’s “time to put Trump in the bullseye,” but far worse rhetoric from Biden has been commonplace for years. Biden’s infamous Red Wedding speech in Philadelphia, where he declared Trump and MAGA Republics were a threat to democracy, was nearly two years ago. He has maintained that dangerous rhetoric ever since, repeating some version of it nearly every week. On June 28, the president posted on X that Trump is “a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
It’s not just Biden of course. Democrats and the media have encouraged political violence against Trump for years, with a constant stream of overheated rhetoric designed to provoke riots, terrorist attacks, and assassinations. Now that it has led to an actual assassination attempt against Trump, they say they want to cool the rhetoric and call for national unity. I don’t think so. You don’t smack someone in the face with a hammer and then insist everyone needs to calm down.
The corporate media especially has long pushed what Mollie Hemingway back in December called assassination prep: nonstop comparisons of Trump to Hitler, incessant warnings that if Trump isn’t stopped it will mean the end of democracy in America, and mantra-like repetition that a Trump victory in November means the gulags for every leftist identity group. It would sound cartoonish if it weren’t true.
The June issue of The New Republic is explicitly devoted to comparing Trump to Hitler, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. It’s full of essays about how grim life will be under Dictator Trump. The editors justified this by saying, “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”
The Atlantic recently titled an entire issue “If Trump Wins,” featuring dozens of articles outlining all the ways Trump will destroy America if he wins a second term. Top of the list is a piece by David Frum on autocracy under Trump, followed by pieces on misogyny, corruption, extremism, and so on. (Frum, not to be outdone by himself, posted an insane rant Sunday morning blaming Trump for his own attempted assassination, declaring that “the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”)
This kind of assassination prep has been going on for years. The Russia-collusion hoax was designed in part to paint Trump as the agent of a malign foreign power working to undermine our country. Trump, we were told, was the enemy of the American people and had to be stopped. They never let go of that narrative, and now it’s back in a slightly different form: Trump has to be stopped because this time, he’ll do all the horrible things he didn’t get a chance to last time, plus he’ll be out for revenge.
Democrats are unbothered by this sort of rhetoric. They engage in it so often it has become routine. At a rally last Thursday, Vice President Harris warned that Trump would be a dictator, weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents, and destroy the Constitution. On Friday, Biden said, “Americans want a president, not a dictator,” and, “I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation.”
The purpose of such talk was to prepare the ground for an attempt on Trump’s life, and it worked. After all, if you believe a second Trump term will usher in a fascist dictatorship, a reincarnation of Hitler, then surely it’s morally justified, arguably even your duty, to do whatever it takes to stop him.
But it’s not just assassination prep rhetoric. Consider a bill recently proposed by the former head of the Jan. 6 Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., to strip Trump of Secret Service protection. To most people, that looks like a deliberate attempt to make it as likely as possible that something like Saturday’s attack on Trump’s life would happen — and succeed.
That’s why Democrat calls for unity and calm ring hollow now. They don’t want unity and calm, they want violence. They wanted it in 2020 and they want it today. It doesn’t matter what they say now that violence has come. It matters what they said in the lead-up to it.
After the assassination attempt, Biden feigned outrage, saying, “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” No, it’s not. Democrats are constantly hinting at it and tacitly encouraging it if they aren’t calling for it outright.
So no, there will be no unity and no toning down of anything until Democrats and the media renounce their past violent rhetoric and stop encouraging the worst, most unstable elements in the country to carry out political terrorism.
Until then, the rest of us will understand what Democrats and the media have made clear: They are our enemies, they wish us real harm, and they are prepared to plunge the nation into violence and civil strife before they relinquish power. There’s no unity to be had with such people.