We don’t yet know the motive of the man who tried to kill Donald Trump last week and, very likely, we never will. Earlier this week, F.B.I. officials told members of Congress that Thomas Matthew Crooks had used his cell phone to research Trump, President Joe Biden, a member of the British royal family, and “major depressive order.” The bureau has yet to find “any political or ideological information” concerning his motives.
Yet within hours of the assassination attempt—indeed, before the shooter had even been identified—the former president’s most ardent supporters named the real culprits: Biden, the media, and the left.
“Just days ago, Biden said ‘it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,’” Senator Marsha Blackburn wrote on X, quoting a remark made on a private phone call with campaign donors. Ohio senator J. D. Vance, who was tapped to be Trump’s vice-presidential candidate two days later, wrote, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Representative Lauren Boebert put an even finer point on it, saying, “Joe Biden is responsible for the shooting today.”
For a party so enamored of individual responsibility, it’s strange to see Republicans blame everyone but the would-be murderer. More worrisome is the right’s sudden embrace of the concept of “stochastic terrorism.” This theory, popularized in the 2010s by left-wing bloggers, attributes acts of violence to the inflammatory language of public figures. It also conflicts head-on with a value Republicans purport to hold dear: free speech.
It’s certainly a freedom they avail themselves of. To take but one of the many gruesome things Trump said on the 2016 campaign trail, suggesting that “the Second Amendment people” do something to stop Hillary Clinton from grabbing their guns was particularly piquant. “Hang Mike Pence,” a crowd of Trump supporters cried as they violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“We’re living in a Fascist state,” Trump declared on the day he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, a ruling that prompted his campaign to send out a fundraising e-mail beginning, “Friend: Is this the end of America?” At last month’s debate, Trump accused Biden of deliberately allowing “millions of people to come in from prisons, jails and mental institutions … and destroy our country.”
The fact is that Biden is no more responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump than Sarah Palin, who overlaid crosshairs on a map of Democratic congressional districts, was responsible for the assassination attempt on then congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Blaming heated and even intemperate words for the violent actions of madmen invites censorship and deflects responsibility from those who actually commit violent acts.
The right’s insistence that rhetoric provoked an assassination attempt may come to resemble the way Lyndon B. Johnson and liberal media commentators blamed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the “climate of hate” in Dallas. To this day, the myth that Kennedy was felled by an amorphous sentiment rather than by Lee Harvey Oswald’s militant Communist fanaticism persists, exemplified by a 2023 story in The Guardian headlined, “Dallas Lives with JFK Legacy—but Hate That Spawned Assassination Simmers.”
The fact is that Biden is no more responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump than Sarah Palin was responsible for the assassination attempt on then congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
None of this is to say that some of the left-wing discourse about Trump has been a model of civility. Asserting that Trump will single-handedly “destroy American democracy” (a feat he somehow failed to accomplish during the four years when he was the most powerful man on earth), describing him as a “Fascist,” saying that he is “worse than” Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, portraying him with a Hitler mustache on the cover of a once respectable magazine—all are lazy and incendiary ruses to avoid grappling with the Democrats’ own political vulnerabilities. Even worse are the attention-seeking historians of 20th-century European Fascism, who with shallow analogies sacrifice their scholarly reputations for short-term partisan ends.
It would be nice if both liberals and conservatives stopped portraying their adversaries as “existential” threats to the republic. But Americans are allowed to say hysterical and ignorant things. The answer to political violence is not to limit speech but to encourage more of it, as speech is the only legitimate way to express grievances in a liberal democracy. And it is precisely at times of high political tension when freedom of expression is most needed. Violence is where we must draw the line.
James Kirchick is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
