Top Democrats, including Biden, have spent months painting Trump in the worst possible light. Did that lead to the shooting?
![Dems spent months demonizing Trump, then a shooting happened Dems spent months demonizing Trump, then a shooting happened](https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/torontosun/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2159960948-e1720139774978.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216&sig=8LDgibvnA2E93XlKtnRyAQ)
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After months of Donald Trump being described as a dictator and a threat to democracy that must be stopped, someone tried, not with a better campaign but a volley of bullets. America’s rage boiled over on Saturday, but not before political and business leaders opposed to Trump spent months raising the temperature.
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“It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye,” Biden told donors in early July, according to New Times reporter Kenneth P. Vogel.
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Just two weeks earlier, Biden told supporters that Trump was a threat to America’s existence.
“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. That is not hyperbole. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy,” Biden said, adding that he wouldn’t let Trump destroy America just before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
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It’s not just Biden using over-the-top rhetoric about Trump; former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC that Trump is an authoritarian autocrat and if he wins the election, he’s not someone that Democrats can cooperate with.
“This is something that is undermining our democracy, and he must be stopped. He cannot be president!” Pelosi said.
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Meanwhile, MSNBC host Joy Reid called Trump Hitler in a video posted to social media and said that her goal was to “keep Hitler out the White House.”
Reid isn’t alone with the Hitler comparison. The left-wing magazine, the New Republic, published their latest issue with a cover that transformed a Hitler campaign photo from 1932 into Trump’s face.
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Democrats, who regularly will tell you that language is violence, that dangerous rhetoric can lead to violence, have spent months calling Trump a dictator, Hitler, saying he is a threat to democracy. By their own measure, they helped cause this by ramping up the temperature to the point where someone snapped and tried to kill Trump rather than let voters decide in November.
Let’s be clear, no one is responsible for the shooting except the guy with the gun pulling the trigger.
Yet, based on the language of Democrats and their supporters, they helped create the climate for this shooting to take place. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, said he wished he had made Trump a martyr.
In a heated exchange last week, PayPal founder Peter Thiel thanked Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump which have turned him into a political martyr. Hoffman’s response is one that he is trying hard to distance himself from now.
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“Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr,” Hoffman quipped.
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In the wake of the shooting, Hoffman is saying that political violence has no place in America.
Biden on Sunday tried to call for unity, saying “we must unite as one nation, to demonstrate who we are.”
Well, for the past several months, the Democrats, led by Biden, have been claiming that Trump’s bid to ask voters for a second term in the Oval Office is the biggest threat to democracy. You can’t claim someone is a threat to democracy, that they are Hitler, that they must be stopped and then say after someone tries to shoot Trump dead that what is needed is unity.
Trump is guilty of his own sins when it comes to over-the-top rhetoric.
“A plague on both your houses!” Mercutio famously said in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
I’m not going to take sides in this battle between Biden and Trump on overheated rhetoric. That said, one side can’t constantly claim that rhetoric leads to violence and then wash their hands of the matter and call for unity when violence does occur.
America does need unity; she needs a calming voice that will bring sides together. Sadly, I don’t see that happening during this election cycle.
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