We can say anything we want, no matter how vicious, racist, incendiary or violent, but if you call us fascists or Nazis, then that’s an obvious incitement to political violence and possibly criminal.
That’s essentially the insta-reaction of many Republican officials and MAGA pundits to the reported assassination attempt against President Donald Trump and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night at the Washington Hilton.
Based on the accused would-be assassin Cole Tomas Allen’s reported writings before he attempted to storm the dinner, it seems apparent that “politics” in the broadest sense motivated him to try to commit what could have been a history-altering massacre. But it also seems pretty evident by allegedly deciding to take guns across state lines with murderous intent that he’s a deeply disturbed individual acting irrationally. He appears to have had easy access to guns and, by his own telling, encountered shockingly lax security at almost every juncture leading up to his attempted sprint past relaxed-looking Secret Service agents Saturday night.
This is a classic, crybullying civility cop move.
There isn’t a single Democratic official or prominent liberal commentator minimizing or making excuses for Allen’s actions or rationalizations for attempting to commit murder. On the contrary, there’s been universal condemnation from that side. Yet that hasn’t stopped the accusations of incitement from the civility cops of the MAGA right, who accuse Democrats of cultivating violence while ignoring — if not celebrating — Trump’s most vicious, inhumane and racist statements.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., in a Fox News interview Monday falsely claimed “Democrats want President Trump, Republicans murdered all across this country. Capitalists murdered.” He then pivoted to what seemed like a rehearsed speech about funding the Department of Homeland Security, invoking illegal immigrants accused of killing Americans and saying “Democrats don’t care.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday insinuated the media is responsible for inciting violence for “being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason.” (Blanche, in January, accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “terrorism” for their resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown that left two Americans shot to death in the street.)
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, also on Monday, blamed “the entire Democrat Party” for inspiring violence because they pitch to voters that Trump — who attempted a self-coup based on wholesale lies about election fraud in the 2020 election — “poses an existential threat to democracy, that he is a fascist and they compare him to Hitler.”
Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson posted Sunday, “The only time Democrats oppose collective responsibility for an action is when a progressive tries to kill people, inspired by Democrat rhetoric.”
This is a classic, crybullying civility cop move. Erickson, after all, is not only the same guy who in 2017, wrote “The political left is becoming the American ISIS,” but he also wrote in 2016 that Trump is a “racist,” a “fascist” and, “It can’t be any wonder that so many people with swastikas in their Twitter profile pics back Donald Trump. It takes one to know one.”
Trump in recent months has accused six Democratic members of sedition and suggested they should be hanged. (Sen. Scott dismissed concerns over this as Trump merely being “hypothetical.”)
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday insinuated the media is responsible for inciting violence for “being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason.”
He reacted to the tragic murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele by saying their killings “were reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.” And he despicably celebrated former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s death of natural causes: “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”
As my MS NOW colleague Steve Benen noted last week, Trump is “the president who has told Americans his political opponents are ‘fascists’ who are also guilty of ‘treason.’ His domestic foes are also ‘enemies of the people,’ ‘the enemy within’ and ‘threats to democracy.’ Last year, Trump went so far as to insist Democrats were ‘evil’ and members of ‘the party of Satan.’”
As I wrote last year, “It’s a fool’s errand trying to shame MAGA bigwigs by holding up a mirror to their flagrant hypocrisy. They don’t care, and they relish shameless trolling — like wielding awesome power to police the same words they use all the time.”
But we must remain vigilant that the MAGA cancel culture of censorship, firings, sanctions and even arrests that followed Charlie Kirk’s assassination isn’t replicated. And we should never accept the MAGA demand that their words be met with no recriminations (because that’s “cancel culture” and “incitement”), while insisting that their opponents never call them a mean name — even when the shoe fits.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.