The solution to political violence is purely partisan | Opinion
Donald Trump is right. “I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most … they’re the ones that they go after,” he told reporters at The White House only minutes after the latest man to attempt to assassinate him was arrested inside the very building whereo Ronald Reagan — one of his impactful predecessors — was shot.
Trump’s sprawling, high-speed agenda that has reshaped Washington and the world, through executive actions that seem to mostly be implemented outside our constitutional design, is as big a magnet for assassins as any that has come before.
The fact that the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were all marred by gunfire aimed at the president as the shape of our constitutional republic and the world were in play only underlines Trump’s point.
From early indications — a donation to Donald Trump’s 2024 Democratic presidential opponent and anonymous characterizations of evidence collected since the shooting — the latest man to come gunning for Trump or his supporters was a political opponent. With nearly three years left in his term, there is undoubtedly going to be more of this.
But it is important to remember that it has only been two months since a 21-year-old former Trump supporter obsessed with the Epstein files was shot and killed as he tried to enter Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun.
Trump for his part is calling for national unity and healing according to the Associated Press, which quotes him as saying, “We have to, we have to resolve our differences,” the president said. “I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.”
That incoherent pastiche of thoughts is the best we’re going to get from him, but the Democrats’ response has been little better. Rep. Rho Khanna called for a bipartisan national commission on the violence to look into mental health, social media and political rhetoric among other things.
“We need to do something to bring the temperature down,” he said.
That something needs to be more than a roundup of the usual suspects, and it surely does not require anything bipartisan, commission, conversation or otherwise.
Republican conspiracy theory problem
No, the sane leaders of each party know what problems lie at their own doorstep. After the Epstein files gunman at Mar-a-Lago, it comes as no shock to conservative commentators and Republican politicians alike that we have a conspiracy theory problem on our side of the aisle.
Our fellows conceived of them, spread them, fueled them and now sustain them. This is not a bipartisan problem that requires cooperation with Democrats and liberals. This is an us problem.
We need to call out the purveyors of this filth and purge them from among us. The problem is that Donald Trump is one of those conspiracy theorists and as long as he sits at the center of our politics, this isn’t going to change. One thing more of us can do is to be brave enough to take Trump on and speak the truth. We all can do more.
It will be a hard sell to get Democrats and progressive commentators to do the hard self-evaluation needed on their side as long as Trump makes the right’s problem impossible to solve.
Maybe folks on that side know better than me what is to be done about violence from the political left, but let me make one suggestion. Stop equating legal, normal things with violence. Democrats and their allies in academia, education and the arts have long argued that mean speech can cross the line into violence.
That’s bunk, but if speech is violence, such savagery invites violence in retaliation. It is an unavoidable and deadly reality of such rhetoric.
Indeed, it was only last week that a popular podcast guest of The New York Times accused insurance executives of “social murder” for operating their companies under the law. If insurance executives are guilty of murder, why not gun them down as has already happened?
Young liberals more likely to approve political violence
This might be the reason that young liberals are much more likely to believe that political violence can be justified according to an Economist-YouGov poll.
And each party needs to address the growing common affliction of extremists on the right and left found in antisemitism, which has fueled its own violence. Each needs to address its own side and doesn’t need any help from its political opponents to purge those who peddle such poison. My friends can start with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as well as anyone who supports or associates with such hucksters for evil.
With gunfire still echoing in the halls of the bipartisan White House Correspondents Association dinner, we should all do something purely partisan — take a good hard look at our fellows and point out the problems we are responsible for. The first party to fix its crazy will be a step ahead in elections for a long time to come.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
