It is not to defend the general Trump approach to politics to say this level of deadly hostility to Trump is evil, somewhat insane and almost certainly not unrelated to the wild lies told about Trump by his Democrat opponents, including Kamala Harris.
There is of course no simple cause and effect. A politician in a democracy who mounts even extremely robust criticism of an opponent is not morally responsible for the actions of an extremist who attempts violence. The person morally responsible for violence is the person who carries out violence.
But Democrats, including Harris, routinely tell the most appalling, extremist lies about Trump. This is doubly weird because there’s more than ample in Trump’s actual words and actions that thoroughly deserve criticism. Mostly, Trump is a brash, crude, often offensive and even chaotic politician. He’s not the author of American fascism, the new Hitler, the leader of anti-democratic storm troopers. The dishonest extremism of much of the criticism of Trump contributes at least as much, perhaps more, to the toxic nature of American political and cultural debate as does Trump himself.
Trump’s most serious transgression, his behaviour during the January 6 riots, is partly mitigated by the fact he told his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully”. Trump’s behaviour was nonetheless grossly offensive; it doesn’t make him Hitler.
Harris’s personal attacks on Trump contain fantastic and extreme lies. Because Trump himself often says such hateful and untrue things about other people, unless you’re a Trump partisan, which I certainly am not, you’re not much inclined to defend him on personal issues.
But Democrats claim to be operating on a higher moral plane than Trump. Therefore they should make some effort to link their criticisms to reality and in particular not to make demagogic and extreme accusations about Trump that they know are untrue.
Consider just a couple of examples. In the debate, Harris claimed that Trump had said that if the presidential election went against him, there would be a “bloodbath”. Any normal person hearing this would assume Harris was telling the truth and that Trump had threatened bloodshed and killings if he lost the election. In fact Trump said there would be a bloodbath in the auto industry if the Democratic candidate were elected president, partly because of electric vehicle mandates.
So Harris is not only telling a barefaced lie about Trump, she is telling the kind of lie that elevates Trump from the ranks of a bombastic and complicated politician to a kind of Adolf Hitler-like threat to American democracy itself.
Indeed, the Democratic National Convention heard that Trump was the greatest threat to US democracy in its history.
Harris also claimed in the debate that Trump had described neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. In fact, Trump explicitly condemned the neo-Nazis but said that on both sides of the demonstrations – related to controversy over statues of Civil War era leaders in the south – there were very fine people.
Again, in this claim Harris has dishonestly alleged that Trump supports neo-Nazis. Trump does many dishonourable things that rightly deserve criticism. He has not, however, as Harris claims, supported neo-Nazis, or called for mass killings if he should lose the election. So these wild and untrue allegations about Trump contribute to a fever pitch of hostility, anger and public derangement.
This kind of response characterised the Democrats all through the Trump presidency. Remember the Russia collusion hoax, which held that the Trump campaign had illegally colluded with Russia, and that Moscow played a role in Trump winning the 2016 election. Our own ABC devoted vast taxpayer-funded resources to propagating this utterly mythical hoax. And it never subsequently properly acknowledged that its journalism in that case was mistaken.
Sadly, these days there are deranged people on the left, deranged people on the right, and people with what you might describe as free-floating derangement waiting to fix on one cause or another. If you constantly present them with false facts, which purport to show not that Trump is a grubby and unreliable politician, but that he is an American Hitler in waiting, this can easily fertilise into the idea that it would be better if he were just taken out altogether.
By the way, it’s astonishing how little fuss has been made of the plot by the Iranian government to kill Trump. That the Iranians apparently want Trump gone is perhaps Trump’s best character reference.
Try this thought experiment. Just imagine that a Russian government plot to assassinate Harris had been discovered. This involved US intelligence about the plot and the arrest of an agent of a foreign country said to be working for the Russians. (Obviously, nothing like this has happened, but it’s a hypothetical equivalent to Iranian efforts against Trump). Imagine then that two serious assassination attempts had been made against Harris. This is a hideous thing to imagine in any way, but it’s useful to elucidate the underlying politics.
If all that had happened, the American cultural, media and political establishment would be in full nuclear core meltdown over the arrival of fascism in America. Furious photos of Trump as the author of American despair would figure on the front page of every liberal newspaper. Hand-wringing essays of national despair would proliferate. Probably some court somewhere would find a pretext to indict Trump yet again.
The point of all this is that if Democrats want to be regarded as morally superior to Trump they should start behaving that way. Their calls for national unity are plainly hypocritical and hollow when they lie about their opponent in such extremist ways.
Trump’s erratic, changeable and unreliable rhetoric make it difficult to judge how he would govern. But there is the first Trump term. It’s perfectly legitimate for voters, and indeed allies, to look to actual experience. Economically and in foreign policy, there’s a strong case that Trump’s term was better than Joe Biden’s has been.
The media is failing US politics as well. The US budget deficit this year will be $US2 trillion. Interest payments are already bigger than the defence budget. Yet none of the debate moderators thought this subject worth raising.
In many ways Trump is unattractive, but his courage in the face of all the threats against him is highly laudable. So is his desire to keep mixing with the public, keep doing big rallies. The Biden administration should not force Trump indoors for his own safety, which would diminish US democracy. It should instead give him the same level of Secret Service protection as the President himself enjoys. For all his failings, Trump’s personal courage is a significant asset for US democracy.
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Two lone gunmen, and the Iranian government, have all made efforts to assassinate Donald Trump in the past couple of months. That’s surely the single most astonishing fact of this very strange election campaign.