Telling the truth is not incitement
“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell,” President Harry Truman once said. The Trumpist right is catching hell over the truth about Project 2025.
Vox:
Roughly two hours after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blamed President Joe Biden.
“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,” Vance, the odds-on favorite to be Trump’s vice president, wrote on X formerly known as Twitter).
Vance was not alone. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote that “Democrats wanted this to happen.” Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said something similar. So did Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
All of this happened Saturday night, before we knew a single thing about the shooter’s identity or motive. Since then, the Secret Service has identified him as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, and we still don’t know much about his motive.
Bob Cesca reminded Twitter that before the press repeats claims from the MAGA right that the left’s calling out authoritarian plans developed and published by authoritarians as blameworthy somehow for the Trump assassination attempt, it should review the valorization of gun culture and violence on the right.
Zack Beauchamp contimues at Vox:
In libel law, truth is an absolute defense: you can’t be held legally responsible for damaging someone’s reputation if what you’re saying is actually true.
The same should hold true for Democrats’ rhetoric about Trump. Donald Trump really is a threat to democracy. He tried to overturn the 2020 election, incited a riot at the US Capitol, and is currently putting forward a 2025 policy agenda that could place dangerous amounts of power in his personal hands. Democrats not only should say that; they also have an obligation to voters to make it the centerpiece of their case.
In fact, it’s the parlous state of American democracy that makes the Republican response to Trump’s shooting so dangerous.
Trump dominates the Republican Party because a critical mass of the party’s base really, really hates Democrats. They believe that the Democratic Party is out to get them and destroy their way of life, and are willing to entrust power to a cruel demagogue in order to defeat the left. A small portion of this base believes this so deeply that they’re willing to commit actual violence in order to stop Democrats.
Hell no, we won’t back off.
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