The Blame Game

Are Trump's critics responsible for the assassination attempt?

Unless you’re living in a remote cabin in the Yukon Territory which at this point in History might seem like a reasonable alternative, you already know someone took a shot at Donald Trump at one of his rallies. And while the incident was still going on, some of the people at the rally were already blaming the media which (kinda sorta) includes me.  

After all, we warned people that Trump had big plans for America if he got a second term and a lot of his plans were dangerous. According to many Republicans, those warnings created a toxic atmosphere and someone taking a shot at Trump was the logical outcome.

So now the Republicans want Trump’s critics to shut up and an unsurprising number of weak-kneed Trump critics are wringing their hands and deploring how nasty the political atmosphere has gotten and regret saying all the horribly accurate things they said about Donald Trump.

But as John Paul Jones so famously said when a British ship’s captain asked if he was ready to surrender: “Fuck that.”

What the media actually did

Here’s a story from U.S. News & World Report posted in June of this year about Trump vowing revenge on his enemies and he made the same threat three times in three days so it wasn’t a passing fantasy and Trump was talking to Phil McGraw, better known as “Dr. Phil” when he said:

“And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

When he was asked in a Fox interview if he planned to use the justice system to punish his opponents, Trump said:

"When this election is over, based on what they've done, I would have every right to go after them.”

If reelected Trump vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden and his family and here’s the story about all that:

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-06-07/trumps-latest-campaign-pledge-revenge

How about Trump’s plans for the federal government?

The following Associated Press article from November of last year reported Trump’s plans to: fire civil service workers and replace them with loyalists, crack down on employees who leak information to reporters (which is how we found out about Watergate), deport people who harbor “jihadist sympathies” and “anti-American” views, build more of the border wall, bring military troops stationed in other countries home for immigration enforcement, impose a system of tariffs on most foreign goods, reevaluate NATO’s purpose and mission, pass a bill establishing only two genders as determined at birth, increase oil drilling on public lands, exit the Paris Climate Accords, end subsidies for wind power, terminate the Department of Education, promote prayer in schools, cut funding for any school that has a mask or vaccine mandate (hang on, we’re almost there) support schools that allow trained teachers to carry concealed weapons, provide federal funds for armed school guards and empower police to shoot suspected shoplifters.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-policies-agenda-election-2024-second-term

And now a couple points worth thinking about

1. All that information about Donald Trump’s plans for America comes from Donald Trump. Those are goals Trump mentioned in speeches and interviews.

2. If a presidential candidate said all that stuff, what would you think of the media if they didn’t cover it or talk about it?

So the pro-Trumpers are mad because Donald Trump said a bunch of controversial stuff to appeal to his followers and the media reported that stuff and talked about it and by reporting it and talking about it, the media – not Trump – created a toxic atmosphere.

Apparently you shouldn’t ever say anything negative about anybody, even if what you say is accurate because you might encourage somebody to pick up a gun and start shooting at people.

OK, got it.

So how about the stuff Trump said about Democrats?

During the most recent debate Donald Trump said Joe Biden wants to quadruple our taxes, “they” (and I’m guessing he meant Liberals and Democrats) want to perform abortions after birth (not sure how that would work) and because of Biden’s lousy border policies, migrants are flooding our country and killing our citizens.

Those are serious charges; what if somebody decided Biden was a threat and needed to be stopped by any means necessary?

And just in case you’ve forgotten, Trump and Nancy Pelosi had a feud; Trump called her “crazy” said “she’s a mess” and nicknamed her “Crazy Nancy.” Trump has also talked incessantly about Deep State corruption and all the bureaucrats out to get him, so is Trump responsible for a nutjob showing up at Pelosi’s house and attacking her husband with a hammer?

The Republicans, who are now saying Biden’s rhetoric about Trump is responsible for the assassination attempt, never said Trump’s rhetoric was responsible for the attack on Paul Pelosi and Republicans even told jokes about the incident because what’s funnier than an 82-year-old man getting his skull fractured in a hammer attack?

Now here’s a YouTube video that shows Donald Trump calling for the execution of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and mocking Paul Pelosi and it’s a nine-minute video, so I’d jump ahead about three-and-a-half minutes where Trump promises to take on the “ultra-left wing, liars, creeps, perverts and freaks” and it was hard to hear the next bit because the Republicans – who are now whining about Joe Biden’s overheated rhetoric – were cheering so loudly.

And while we’re looking at videos here’s one Trump retweeted showing him physically attacking a figure with a CNN logo for a head. After that, Trump was accused of inciting violence against the media and I don’t remember a lot of Republicans getting too upset about it:

Bottom line: the Republicans are now criticizing the same type of over-heated rhetoric that they constantly use themselves, but it’s OK when they do it and totally wrong when their opponents do the same thing.

https://apnews.com/article/ce08485cee37470db8983b8bd06c40a0

Conclusion – and I’ve got several of them

Obviously, shooting at people you disagree with is a bad idea, but while a lot of people in the media (including me) have warned about the dangers of a second Trump presidency, as far as I know none of us ever said, “So go ahead and try to shoot him.”

We were suggesting voting for Trump was a bad idea.

And encouraging people to vote for or against a candidate has happened in every campaign ever held, but now we’ve got a bunch of hand-wringing people saying it’s never been this bad before, which makes me wonder how they forgot the Civil War.

Jesus H. Christ, in 1804 the vice-president of the United States shot and killed the former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel.

In 1934, right here in Kansas City, the Goats and Rabbits (two groups of Democrats, so they didn’t work well together then either) were feuding on Election Day and beating up and kidnapping people who were voting the wrong way and the violence kept escalating until they started shooting people and four of those people died.

There aren’t many advantages to getting older, but one of them is living through and remembering things other people seem to have forgotten or want to ignore and I’m old enough to remember the country theoretically being torn apart by Civil Rights and Vietnam and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter protests.

We tend to be myopic and like to think we have it way worse than anybody in History and things have never been this quite bad, but we survived all that, so while shooting politicians is an incredibly bad idea, odds are we’ll survive this too.

Second conclusion:

Are the people who create music or write articles or make movies or draw cartoons responsible for the actions of anyone who misinterprets what those people created?

Is Paul McCartney responsible for the Manson Family murders because he wrote Helter Skelter?

Is John Lennon responsible for his own murder because he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and wrote Imagine?

Are Jodie Foster, Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese responsible for Ronald Reagan getting shot because they made Taxi Driver?

Charles J. Guiteau assassinated President James A. Garfield because Guiteau felt his work for the Republican Party had been responsible for Garfield’s election (Guiteau had written a speech supporting Garfield and delivered it a total of two times) and Guiteau believed his terrific speech put Garfield over the top so he obviously deserved an appointment as the Ambassador to France, but didn’t get it, which in Guiteau’s mind meant Garfield needed to be killed.

As History shows, there are plenty of people walking around a few lights short of a Christmas Tree who can misinterpret the simplest gesture and if you still don’t believe me, watch Netflix’s Baby Reindeer which is based on a true story about a bartender who had his life destroyed by a stalker who wildly misinterpreted his willingness to give her a free cup of tea.

Third conclusion:

Even before they got Trump away from the scene, his supporters had already decided it was the media’s fault despite the fact that they knew absolutely nothing about the shooter (who turned out to be a registered Republican), but if they were looking for someone or something to blame, how about the lax gun laws (which most Republicans support) that meant someone could get his hands on an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle?

I don’t want anyone to shoot Donald Trump or anyone else and have never encouraged that and never will, but intend to keep saying Trump shouldn’t be president even though Republicans are now trying to use the assassination attempt to silence Trump’s critics.

Wait, three things I almost forgot to mention when it comes to Donald Trump encouraging political violence and the Republicans being A-OK with it:

1. January 6^th

2. January 6^th

3. January 6^th

And if my efforts to defeat Donald Trump pan out, I’m pretty sure you’re looking at the next Ambassador to France.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/