President Joe Biden condemned the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life in no uncertain terms on Saturday night. He deserves credit for doing this bare moral minimum, but now Democratic officials and their liberal media allies must stop with their constant alarmism and doomsday exaggerations before our culture war gets even more out of control.
After all, just days ago, the official “Biden HQ” social media accounts shared a screenshot from The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian television series where women are forced into sex slavery, and absurdly suggested that this is the fate awaiting America under a second Trump term. So, too, Biden has repeatedly said that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy and also that Trump would be a “dictator” if elected again, twisting a comment the former president clearly said as a joke.
We’ve seen even more extreme rhetoric from left-leaning media outlets. MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace suggested, with no basis, that if Trump wins, her show will be taken off air and we’ll see an end to a free press in America. Another MSNBC anchor, Joy Reid, recently described a second Trump term as “Hitler in the White House.” The New Republic even recently published a cover story styling Trump as Hitler.
These are just examples from the past few weeks of hundreds if not thousands of doomsday, alarmist warnings about Trump we’ve seen from the left-of-center establishment. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Trump, but all this rhetoric clearly overstates the facts and, given that we already had one Trump presidency and literally none of these things happened, is incredibly detached from factual reality.
Yet all it takes is one crazy person to take these massively hyperbolic comments literally, and you can end up with the kind of jarring and tragic incident we saw on Saturday night. This shooter’s motivations aren’t yet confirmed, but how many times do you have to tell people falsely that Trump would be a dictator who will enslave women and put Americans in camps before some deranged individual believes you and acts accordingly?
To be clear, only the shooter bears ultimate responsibility for the assassination attempt. What happened isn’t Joe Biden’s, Nicole Wallace’s, or Joy Reid’s fault, or the fault of anyone except the individual who pulled the trigger. But, by the logic that liberals and progressives routinely use to blame conservatives for violent acts by others, they would have “blood on their hands,” and it’s not unfair to hold people to their own standards.
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Yes, Republicans sometimes engage in alarmist rhetoric too, and they should not be so quick to label their political opponents “groomers” or accuse them of supporting an “invasion” of the United States. But, at least in recent political memory, liberals and progressives have engaged in significantly more fearmongering and alarmism than conservatives and Republicans. (Remember when repealing net neutrality was going to end the internet?)
We desperately need leaders in both parties to embody civility and take the temperature down in our boiling political discourse. If elected officials and major media outlets continue to engage in routine alarmism and fantastical fearmongering, more political violence will surely ensue.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.