America’s toxic political climate faces calls to ‘tone it down’ after assassination attempt on Trump
WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — “Slow down!”
That was the plea of a Republican congressman as he struggled with the attempted murder in return for Donald Trump at a political rally in the Butler Farm neighborhood where he grew up.
“I am stunned by how and what has happened to the United States of America,” Rep. Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press early Sunday morning.
The shocking attempt on Trump’s life has thrown into sharp relief the toxic climate in American political life. While the details of the shooter’s motive remain unclear, the violence is a further measure of how what was once unacceptable, if not unthinkable, in American society has become painfully commonplace.
Like the Elections 2024 enters a crucial phase prior to the national conventions, how the nation responds will be the first test presidential election since 2020, an election defined by efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat and the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol.
On Sunday, civic leaders, pastors and elected officials of the president gathered. Joe Biden down appealed to Americans for unity, calling for an end to the vitriol.
“We cannot allow this violence to become normalized,” Biden said in an evening address to the nation from the Oval Office.
Under a charged atmosphere, the Republican National Convention opens this week in Milwaukee to rebrand Trump to take the lead as Democrats prepare for their own convention next month, but it is uncertain whether the party will continue to stand behind incumbent President Biden in an expected rematch.
Trump’s rhetoric, though tempered immediately after the shooting, had taken on deeper and darker tones in his third campaign for the White House.
This spring, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and promised to launch the largest domestic deportation operationtold auto workers that there was a “ bloodbath “in this country if he is not re-elected.
“If we don’t win, our country is over,” he said during the New Hampshire primary.
Trump has vowed retaliation against his political rivals, particularly those in the Justice Department, after he was indicted on federal charges of storing confidential documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago and in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump also joked about violence. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, attacked by an intruder looking for the former Speaker of the House of Representatives In 2022 at the family’s San Francisco home — when she was hit on the head with a hammer — Trump mocked the security fence she had installed, calling it inadequate.
Trump got a laugh last year in a speech to Republicans in California when he asked, “By the way, how’s her husband?”
Biden, for his part, has warned that Trump’s return to power poses a grave threat to the country’s civic traditions. He chose a location near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for his first campaign event 2024where the likely revenge was portrayed as ‘all about’ the question of whether democracy can survive.
Biden delivered an address to the nation on Sunday, pointing to examples of past political upheaval, including the events of January 6 and more recently the intimidation of election workers. He said, “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, any violence, ever.”
Yet one of Trump’s potential vice presidential candidates, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, said on social media over the weekend that Biden’s past rhetoric against Trump “directly” led to the attempted assassination.
And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said it’s time to “turn down the temperature in this country,” also blamed Biden’s recent comments during a call with political donors, in which the president said, “It’s time to put Trump in our sights.”
Johnson said he knows Biden did not literally mean to target Trump, but added: “That kind of language from both sides has to be criticized.”
Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is now an opportunity for political leaders to “frame their criticism of others in words that explicitly condemn violence.”
Of the 1968 murders on American leaders From Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the attack on President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the shootings of Republicans and Democrats over the past decade, violence has always been part of American politics.
Other violent incidents have recently been terrifyingly linked to the country’s political strife.
Outside the suburban home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a man stood with a knife and a gun who threatened with murder the judge was arrested in 2022. Members of Congress have faced increased security threats. And intimidation against City and state election officials across the country have led to a wave of departures due to threats to their livelihood.
Last summer, FBI agents shot and killed a Utah man who threatened to kill Biden and called himself a “MAGA Trumper.” That followed a series of drive-by shootings earlier this year targeting Democrats in New Mexico, a shocking outburst that led to criminal charges against a failed candidate for the state legislature who had echoed Trump’s election fraud rhetoric.
A gunman who died in a shootout after trying to enter the FBI’s Cincinnati office in 2022 apparently called on social media for federal agents to be killed “on sight” following the search of Trump’s former Mar-a-Lago estate.
Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on domestic terrorism, said: “The warning signs have been flashing red for months, if not years, about the potential for violence in this election cycle.”
When Trump took the stage Saturday night, he opened the Pennsylvania rally, as he often does. He was full of admiration for the “great, beautiful crowd” that had gathered to see him. He called Biden’s own audience puny by comparison.
The former president had just begun his speech and began his agenda for mass deportation and complaints about a country in decline.
“Our country is going to hell,” Trump said.
A few minutes later shots rang out.
Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, who along with other Republican officials backed Trump, called it all just a terrible tragedy. “The level of incivility and hostility, maybe this is a signal to everybody to tone it down a little bit,” he told the AP.
When the Americans took stock on Sunday, the common message was a call for unity.
The Rev. Chris Morgan, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park, a few blocks from where the shooter lived, called on his congregation during a morning service to pray for the nation.
“There’s clearly a lot going on and a lot that’s causing people great fear and great struggle,” he said. “I want to encourage you to pray for those who were involved, so that they too can discover what it means to be kind to others.”
___
Associated Press writers Ali Swenson, Brian Slodysko and Holly Meyer contributed to this report.