Some corporate and liberal media outlets insisted Sunday that former President Donald Trump contributed to the “violent rhetoric” that they claim helped spur an assassination attempt on the former president.
The FBI identified Thomas Matthew Crooks Sunday morning as the individual who allegedly shot Trump during a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, killing former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding two others. The outlets claimed that some of Trump’s comments over his political career, such as the use of the word “bloodbath,” helped incite Saturday’s assassination attempt.
ABC News hosts George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz claimed past comments by Trump, including his use of the terms “bedlam” and “bloodbath,” contributed to the “violent rhetoric” in the U.S. that helped incite the assassination attempt.
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“President Trump and his supporters have contributed to this violent rhetoric as well,” Stephanopoulos claimed during Sunday’s episode of “This Week.”
“Absolutely, George, we were just looking back this morning to some of the things that former President Trump has said. He warned last March of potential death and destruction if he were charged by the Manhattan District Attorney: ‘Our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful,’” Raddatz responded. “Trump in January warned of bedlam in the country if the criminal charges against him succeeded. And of course, in March, he said, ‘If I don’t get elected, it’s a bloodbath for the whole, and that is the least of it, and it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it.’ He said he was partly joking and that that was taken out of context, but those are, indeed, his words.”
Trump has maintained that his “bloodbath” comment in March was in reference to auto industry jobs that he claimed would be lost if he did not win the upcoming election. Trump used the term “bedlam” following legal arguments before an appeals court regarding his claims of immunity in the Jan. 6 case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, while his lawyers used the term in cases centered on efforts to disqualify him off the ballot using the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
David Frum of “The Atlantic” also cast blame at Trump, claiming the former president incited violence in an article posted Sunday.
“Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well,” Frum wrote. “The attempted murder of Trump — and the killing of a person nearby — is a horror and outrage.”
“It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence ‘has no place’ in American society,” Frum added. “Assassinations, lynchings, riots and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day.”
Frum claimed that Trump supporters brought weapons to “intimidate opponents” during the 2016 and 2020 elections. Trump survived a June 2016 assassination attempt during a Las Vegas rally when a 20-year-old man tried to take a police officer’s gun to shoot the then-presumptive GOP nominee.
In “New York” magazine, columnist Jonathan Chait also appeared to blame Trump’s rhetoric for contributing to the decay of a non-violent norm in American politics.
“While the responsibility for maintaining social peace and the norm of nonviolence is shared equally across the political spectrum, the blame for its decay is not,” Chait wrote. “Trump stokes and feeds upon a lust for violence. He possesses a demagogue’s skill for manipulating his supporters’ most elemental emotions. As a private citizen, he exploited a white woman’s rape in Central Park to demand the execution of innocent young men of color.”
Similar sentiments were expressed in the New Yorker, with author David Remnick claiming Trump stoked the “lowest passions” of his followers.
“Trump has, to say the least, done little to calm or to unify the country he once led and is campaigning to lead again,” Remnick wrote. “Unfortunately, it is hard to recall a public voice in living memory who has done more to arouse the lowest passions that so often percolate within individuals and the greater society. Even as one expresses genuine relief that Trump escaped a worse fate on Saturday (and sympathy for the family of the spectator at the rally who was killed), it is legitimate to describe what Trump and his rhetoric have meant to the country.”
“Over and over, he has glorified brutality, whether it was the desirability of police throwing ‘thugs’ into ‘the back of a paddy wagon’ or a congressional candidate body-slamming a reporter because he dared to ask about health-care policy,” Remnick added.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan bemoaned calls for toning down rhetoric in the wake of the assassination attempt.
“There is no Democratic/liberal equivalent to the nonstop incitement of violence from Trump, MTG, Gaetz, Gosar, Kari Lake, and others,” Hasan claimed in a Saturday post. “The next few days of ‘both sides’ BS is going to kill me.”
Hasan also attacked Trump for promoting violence in a piece on his news site, Zeteo.
“Remember the people who died on, or shortly after, Jan. 6, 2021, including multiple police officers, after a mob incited by Trump assaulted the Capitol?” Hasan asked. “Does Trump have ‘blood on his hands?’ Are we really going to play this (political) game?”
