Let’s start with the easy part. Former President Donald Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was false, hateful and despicable. It wasn’t just a bigoted dog-whistle; it was a full-blown racist fog horn.
So that means Trump was responsible for the bomb threats that Springfield received after his comment, right?
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
Wrong. The only people you should blame for violence are the people who commit it. Otherwise, anyone who speaks ill of another person would be charged with fomenting violence against them.
That’s exactly what happened after the two assassination attempts against Trump, which Republicans attributed to — yes — Democrats’ rhetoric about him. If you keep saying someone is a danger to democracy, GOP critics said, you encourage people to take violent action against him.
Never mind that the shooter in the first attempt was a registered Republican whom classmates described as strongly conservative, or that the man arrested in the second attempt had supported Trump and other GOP candidates in the past. It’s the Democrats’ fault. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump told Fox News.
No. A thousand times no. Democrats weren’t responsible for the attacks on Trump’s life, any more than Trump was responsible for the threats in Springfield. We need both parties to stand down and to stop blaming each other’s speech for the violence that is all around us.
False-equivalence alert: I don’t think saying Trump endangers democracy is the same as saying Haitians are eating pets. The first statement is a matter of opinion — you can agree or disagree with it — and the second is a lie.
But if we decide that speech causes people to behave violently, these distinctions don’t matter. Surely some people might hear the claim about Trump endangering democracy as a call to arms, just as others heard the pet-eating canard that way.
Indeed, some readers might react to this column in a similar vein. I began it by calling Trump a racist liar, which I’ve written many times before. Am I also culpable for the attempts to kill him?
Of course not. But the blame game continues, on both sides of the political aisle.
Republicans said Democratic rhetoric was responsible for the 2017 attack that injured Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La. They also blamed Democrats’ anti-GOP statements for the armed suspect who menaced Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh outside of his home and for the telephoned death threats against Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Meanwhile, Democrats blamed the GOP for inspiring the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., who went on to become one of the country’s leading gun reform activists. And Democrats held Republicans responsible for the Georgia man who attacked an Atlanta massage parlor in 2021. The shooter was white, the victims were Asian, and the GOP has engaged in vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric. What else do you need to know?
Let’s be clear: Republicans have spouted horrible hatred against immigrants, as the recent pet-eating accusation in Springfield illustrates. Even worse, Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, doubled down on the slur after they got heat for it. I would say they should be ashamed, but that wouldn’t make any sense — because they seemingly have no shame.
But I still won’t blame them for the 30-plus bomb threats against Springfield or the subsequent evacuation of schools or two local colleges closing their campuses. All of that is awful, but it’s not the fault of nasty and narcissistic politicians. It’s the fault of the people who made the threats.
And you know what else is awful? The attempts on Trump’s life. But if you scoff at the idea that Democrats were to blame for them, I just don’t see how you can say Trump was responsible for what happened in Springfield.
For the past several weeks, we’ve heard calls from both parties to tone down the rhetoric of violence in our politics. Of course we should do that. The angry temper of our times makes all of us smaller: less tolerant, less decent, less human.
But we also need to stop equating rhetoric with violence. There’s a world of difference between awful speech and awful behavior. And if we lose sight of that, we won’t be able to speak at all.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, of “Free Speech, and Why You Should Give a Damn.”
