On Saturday, during a rally in Pennsylvania, a gunman fired upon former President Donald Trump in what appears to be an assassination attempt. It was a disturbing, needless escalation at a moment when the country already seems to teeter above an abyss. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, leaders from every part of the political spectrum issued statements condemning this sudden outbreak of “political violence.”

Republicans took it as an opportunity to accuse Democrats of complicity in the attack. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—who was just announced as Trump’s running mate—said that “Today is not just some isolated incident. 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.”¹ Several others echoed this idea, suggesting that heated campaign rhetoric was directly to blame, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said that “Democrats wanted this to happen,” and Donald Trump Jr., who said that “Dems and their friends in the media knew exactly what they were doing with the ‘literally Hitler’ bullshit!” Rep. Mike Collins went even further, saying that “Joe Biden sent the orders” and that the district attorney in the town where the shooting took place “should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” 

(Since these accusations were issued, the shooter, who was killed by security agents, has been identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a man whose politics do not appear to have been particularly partisan. He donated $15 to a Democrat-affiliated PAC on the date of Joe Biden’s inauguration. He registered later in 2021 as a Republican. One former classmate, meanwhile, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Crooks “definitely was conservative.”)

Not only are Republicans apparently wrong that the shooting happened because of some deranged liberal or leftist, but they are revealing their complete hypocrisy. That they are hypocrites is hardly astonishing, of course, but it is remarkable how brazen their hypocrisy is. In case you haven’t noticed, conservatives love violent rhetoric. It’s one of their favorite things! 

Trump has spent this campaign season saying that if people don’t vote for him, “we won’t have a country anymore.” He has called his political opponents “vermin” and pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs.” After learning last year about a possible indictment by the Manhattan district attorney for falsifying records in his hush-money case, he warned that there would be “potential death & destruction” across the country as a result. After his indictment in the recently aborted classified documents case, Trump promoted a statement from Senator Lindsey Graham saying there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump were convicted. Shortly after another indictment last year for encouraging the Jan. 6 riot, Trump wrote that “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” on Truth Social. Months later, he posted a photo celebrating a supporter who had a decal on the back of his pickup truck that showed President Biden hog-tied:

Rep. Greene has called for Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason. Her political ads are full of guns and often involve her threatening specific people. She has posed with a gun next to images of “Squad” congresswomen, saying she wants to go on the “offense against these socialists.” In another ad, Greene cocked an AR-15 and warned “Antifa terrorists” to stay out of her district. Later, she filmed one in which she took a 50-caliber rifle and blew up a Prius with the word “socialism” written on it.

And when members of the opposing party have faced assassination attempts, Republicans haven’t exactly responded with the same solemnity that they’re now demanding for Trump. Trump Jr. had this to say when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked with a hammer by a man who’d been driven mad by 2020 election conspiracy theories:

Some of the most disturbing rhetoric from Republicans has come in just the last few weeks. Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, is scheduled to speak at this week’s Republican National Convention. Just last week, he went on a tirade about his “evil” political opponents, saying, “some folks need killing!”:

We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent. You know, there’s a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield, and guess what we did to it? We killed it. … When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what did we do? We flew to Japan! And we killed the Japanese Army and Navy! … We didn’t argue and capitulate and talk about, well, maybe we shouldn’t fight the Nazis that hard. No, they’re bad. Kill them. Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad. Get mad at me if you want to.

 

Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity! When you have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handled. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it.…

 

We need to start handling our business again.… Don’t you feel it slipping away? … The further we start sliding into making 1776 a distant memory and the tenets of socialism and communism start coming into clearer focus. They’re watching us. They’re listening to us. They’re tracking us. They get mad at you. They cancel you. They dox you. They kick you off social media. They come in and close down your business. Folks, it’s happening … because we have forgotten who we are.

Conservative intellectual institutions have embraced cleansing violence as a central goal. At this past week’s National Conservatism Conference, multiple speakers announced their desire to inflict violence and destruction upon the left. A popular right-wing commentator, Jack Posobiec, described the left as “un-humans”:

We don’t negotiate with globalist neo-Marxists. We don’t negotiate with the political version of an auto-immune disease. In a word, ladies and gentlemen—taken from the title of my book—we don’t negotiate with un-humans. Because that’s the stakes of this battle: humanity versus un-humanity. Populist nationalists versus atheist Marxist globalists. Strength, beauty, and genius versus weakness, ugliness, and stupidity. Civilization versus barbarism. Crime and chaos versus law and order.

In a previous rant, delivered shortly after Trump’s guilty verdict, Posobiec told Trump supporters to “Take the path of the hunter, and with one singular voice, we are going to make them the prey.”

Understand, it's time for reciprocity. Reciprocity is the word that I want you to take and put it in your coffee every single morning and mix it up and chew it and spit it out like the grit that they've served you with.

You want to make us eat rocks? No. No. No. No. We're going to make you eat rocks. Anything that you do to us will be returned tenfold.

At the same conference, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said, “NatCon is leading, that we’re in the second American revolution: a political, social, and cultural wrestling from the left…” This revolution, he previously said, would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.” 

It should be emphasized that the people talking about making leftists eat rocks, turning them into prey, and waging a possibly not-so-“bloodless” revolution against them aren’t just random yahoos shouting on the street corner. These people are in the room with members of Congress and advisers to the Trump administration. In the case of Roberts, he is writing policy that is meant to be used if Trump gets back into power.

It’s hard not to blow a gasket watching these very same people suddenly turn around to lecture us about how words are violence. But being scandalized by Republican hypocrisy sort of feels like getting mad at a dog for peeing on your carpet. If anything, you’re the chump for having any sort of expectations for them.

The far more perverse thing, to me, is the way the idea of “political violence” has been invoked in the aftermath of this shooting as something totally alien and un-American. “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” said President Joe Biden. “It’s sick,” he continued, saying that this kind of political violence was “just unheard of.” He later said the violence was “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation.” Former President Obama shared similar sentiments, saying, “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” urging Americans to “use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.” The headline for the New York Times Editorial Board’s take on events was that “The Attack on Donald Trump Is Antithetical to America.”

I’m sorry, but what country do these people think they live in? We’ve just spent the last nine months being blasted in the face with images and videos of some of the most unspeakable carnage imaginable coming out of Gaza. Most of it has been carried out using U.S.-made weapons. Political violence is so “antithetical to America” that on the very same evening that the op-ed was penned, the Israeli military dropped eight massive American-made bombs on the al-Mawasi refugee camp, an area that the Israel Defense Force had previously designated a “safe zone” for civilians to flee. Israel claimed that two senior members of Hamas may have been hiding among the 80,000 civilians sheltering there. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 90 people are dead and 300 are wounded. One of the survivors described the scene to Reuters: “I left the tent and looked around, all the tents were knocked down, body parts, bodies everywhere, elderly women thrown on the floor, young children in pieces.” Not long before reports of this massacre rolled in, Israel Katz, the foreign affairs minister of Israel, issued a condemnation of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying “Violence can never ever be part of politics.” The irony was apparently lost on him.

Many of the people currently condemning political violence don’t actually hate political violence. What they really condemn is violence against politicians. But there is no act of violence more political than dropping bombs on a city of defenseless people because you want their land. Massacres like the one carried out Saturday have been going on for nine months, and, among the political class, they have rarely been condemned with anything nearing the force of the Trump assassination. In fact, the student protesters who spoke out against the war in Gaza—condemning political violence, in other words—were met with state violence themselves, which was cheered on by these same politicians. 

On the contrary, the people right now who are dismayed at political violence are some of its foremost perpetrators. Biden is, of course, selling Israel the weapons they’re using to destroy Gaza and kill scores of its people. Beyond that, President Obama authorized so many drone strikes during his term of office that if he were to apologize to one innocent civilian killed by them each day, it would take him more than three years. Trump, today’s brave victim of political violence, not only expanded those drone assassinations and spoke openly about “taking out terrorists’ families" but even bragged about ordering the assassination of an American citizen in an act of “retribution.” 

Even when they’re not directly ordering acts of what we might think of as “political violence,” U.S. leaders oversee a system that inflicts violence on both a national and global scale.

At home, both parties support a for-profit healthcare system that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year who can’t afford medical care. Each week, nearly 150 people (and nearly 1,500 in the wintertime!) still die of COVID-19, in part because treatments for the illness are so unaffordable. The Biden administration has abandoned most efforts to mitigate the virus, including workplace protections, and ended the public health emergency in 2023, which transferred costs of testing, vaccination, and care from government to health insurance companies and individuals. The CDC now tells workers that they no longer need to stay home from work for five days if they catch the illness, and only one state, New York, still requires businesses to pay leave for employees who are sick with COVID. And some state governments have even criminalized wearing masks in public.

 The Supreme Court just made it legal for states and cities to jail homeless people sleeping outside. Police, whose departments both parties have showered with increasing amounts of funding, killed more people last year than at any point in the previous decade. The U.S. has so many mass shootings that it averages out to more than one a day, but our leaders have failed to pass even the most basic gun control laws, like an assault weapons ban or universal background checks at the federal level. And after mass shootings, Republican-led state legislators in particular have been more likely to loosen gun restrictions rather than tighten them.

When migrants flee poverty and war to seek relative safety in the United States, they are met with razor wire and buoys with blades affixed in order to maim them. Since the U.S. Border Patrol began its Prevention Through Deterrence program in 1994, the agency reports that 10,000 people have been killed while attempting to cross. Other aid organizations estimate the number to be as high as 80,000. Even those who reach the U.S. safely are often subject to inhumane conditions in immigration detention centers.

The United States provides military support to a majority of the globe’s dictators, which allows them to carry out their own acts of political violence. The U.S. has provided arms to Saudi Arabia as it has carried out a monstrous military campaign in Yemen that has killed more than 150,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians. U.S. sanctions have inflicted collective punishment on the people living in enemy nations, like Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, in an effort to foment regime change. One study found that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which deprived its people of food and medical supplies, contributed to as many as 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018 within the country. 

Each act of violence described above is a consequence of political actions or political inactions. And I could go on with more examples, going all the way back to the founding of the nation and the genocide of Native Americans. As former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote in Newsweek yesterday, “America was founded on violence. [...] A nation founded in violence, whose economy is rooted in violence, will have a society that is violent.”  And yet, most of this violence is inflicted on average people, not politicians—which may be one reason our policies are rarely conceived of as “violent.” 

To be clear, I don’t intend to diminish the significance of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. It was indeed a destructive act of political violence that should be opposed. But the very same people who treat an attack on Trump as some horrifying anomaly—including Trump himself—are perpetrators of vastly greater violence than what occurred on Saturday.

 In response to the assassination attempt against Trump, in an effort to “lower the temperature,” the Biden campaign pulled its advertisements criticizing Trump from the air. And on condition of anonymity, campaign officials reportedly told Reuters that “Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president's history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the ‘disorder’ created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict.” (Reuters has since quietly removed this paragraph from the story, though they did not issue a correction or retraction, so the reason is unclear.) Apparently, now that Trump has been shot, he’s no longer a “threat to democracy,” and they’re instead going to spend precious time bashing voters that Biden already desperately needs to support him. 

This was an election where, in the words of President Biden, “Personal freedoms are on the ballot.  The right to privacy, liberty, equality, they’re all on the ballot.” But after the assassination attempt, according to Axios, a “senior House Democrat” says “We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” Two days ago, Trump was Hitler Jr. Now, the party that has spent the last nine years claiming to be the only bulwark against fascism is throwing in the towel with fascism on the doorstep. 

It could not be clearer that, to the people in charge, all of this is a game and a joke. But seen from their perspective, the decision of Democratic elites to essentially throw the election in an act of decorum does make a sort of sense. Writer and attorney Dylan Saba put it quite well on X: “Truly beautiful to see the ruling class come together like this…What’s most important is their personal safety—and the love they have for one another.” 

He’s right! People in Biden’s position will be insulated, more than most, from the consequences of a potential Trump victory. They will not be deported if he wins the election. They’ll be able to pay to get their loved one an abortion if they need one. None of them are transgender and at risk of having their legal personhood revoked. Most of them would probably benefit from Trump’s plan to get rid of the federal income tax in favor of a regressive tariff. 

To the extent that the members of the ruling class care about any of this, it’s only insofar as it affects their personal power and well-being. Just look at how Joe Biden has been acting in the past few weeks as he’s clung to the nomination. When asked how he’d feel if his decision to stay in the race results in Trump returning to power, he said: “I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.” 

That really is “what this is about.” This is about them, their comfort, their egos, and their personal glory—all of it completely divorced from the reality of life for the vast majority of people on this planet. And that’s why an assassination attempt disturbs these people so much more than all the death and destruction that is inflicted on the world each day as a result of their actions. We must remember: the fights that matter are not theirs, they’re ours.

notes

1. This is especially hilarious since Vance used to be a “Never Trump Republican” who once compared Trump to Hitler: “‘I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler,’ he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016.”