Donald Trump is helped off the stage by Secret Service agents at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, following an assassination attempt on the former president.Evan Vucci/AP
It is hardly surprising that a political movement that has as its godhead a convicted felon and inveterate liar who attempted to overturn an election and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to retain power would within nanoseconds exploit the assassination attempt at a Donald Trump rally that left one attendee dead. But the utter brazenness of this effort has been stunning. Before crucial details were known—who’s the shooter? why did he do this?—MAGA was out in full-force to blame President Joe Biden, Democrats, and progressives for this shooting by stirring up anti-Trump sentiment. Leading the way in unhinged right-wing responses, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) called for Biden to be arrested for “inciting an assassination.”
Even after it emerged that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged shooter, was a registered Republican (who apparently made a $15 donation to a liberal political action committee in 2021), the crap kept coming. Sean Parnell, a right-wing commentator who in 2021 suspended his Senate campaign in Pennsylvania after his wife accused him of spousal and child abuse, tweeted at Biden: “It happened because of this sort of BS rhetoric from you & the rest of your party. It’s sickening. It needs to stop.”
At this point, there was not yet any indication the shooter had been influenced by anything any politician had stated.
J.D. Vance, the ultra-thirsty Republican senator from Ohio who is angling to be Trump’s veep pick and who once compared Trump to Hitler, said the same: “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.”
On CNN, GOP consultant Scott Jennings remarked, “The rhetoric around him over the last few weeks, that if he wins an election our country will end, our democracy will end, it’s the last election our we’ll ever have. These things have consequences.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) quickly proclaimed that Biden “is responsible” for the shooting. She then went further than blaming the Ds for their anti-Trump rhetoric and retweeted a post from a MAGA activist who explicitly accused the Democrats of being behind the shooting: “The Dems realized it’s too late to switch out their candidate so they attempted to kill ours instead.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene voiced the same dastardly message: “Democrats wanted this to happen. They’ve wanted Trump gone for years and they’re prepared to do anything to make that happen.” Greene’s remark suggested the Democrats were somehow involved in this attempted assassination.
No shocker, the Kremlin chimed in and echoed the MAGA talking points, saying the Biden administration had created the “atmosphere around candidate Trump” that “provoked” the shooting.
These comments from the Republicans and MAGA extremists were reckless and absurd. For years, Trump has been pushing an ugly narrative: Joe Biden and the Democrats are in league with antifa, Black radicals, and communists to destroy the nation. Trump has said this zillions of times. In both the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, he has exclaimed that if Biden is elected “we may not have a country anymore.” He has repeatedly preached an apocalyptic sermon casting his political rivals as bent on annihilating the United States. He has depicted Biden and his allies as an existential threat to America.
And, of course, Trump has repeatedly encouraged violence—most infamously on January 6. But with this shooting his MAGA allies quickly spotted an opportunity for a rubber-glue propaganda campaign to characterize the Dems as the true threat to democracy and civility and concoct a massive deflection. One of Biden’s chief lines of attack on Trump is that he presents a danger to the republic. Now the Trump crew had a chance to turn the tables and they eagerly grabbed it. Ultimately, the MAGA crowd doesn’t have to win the argument that Biden endangers democracy. They merely need to use it to muddy the waters and undercut the Democrats’ main case against Trump.
There was other ridiculousness from the right. Dave Rubin, a conservative commentator, tweeted, “Assuming it turns out to be true that this sick fuck was an Antifa member, Antifa should be labeled a terrorist organization immediately. And that should’ve happened years ago, actually.” And Elon Musk, who after the shooting issued a full-throated endorsement of Trump, responded, “Absolutely.” When it turned out, the alleged shooter was a Republican, neither called for labelling the GOP a terrorist outfit (as liberal commentator Keith Olbermann noted.)
As did many, Marco Rubio brought God into this, asserting the Almighty had “protected” Trump.
Naturally, this led many on X to wonder why God had not done anything to protect the rally attendee who was killed—or Abraham Lincoln.
On Sunday morning, Ed Martin, a stalwart MAGA-ite who leads a right-wing outfit called Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and who is deputy policy director for the GOP’s platform committee, issued a bizarre social media post claiming “Big Government, Big Tech and Big Media and the Democrat party are trying to rewrite the narrative” by not describing the shooting as an assassination attempt. Yet the chyrons on all the major news networks plainly labeled this event as such. Martin was promoting some crazy conspiracy theory about what he called the #Narrative Machine. (Yes, this man is involved in crafting policy for the Republican Party.)
The attempted assassination of Trump was a horrific event that claimed the life of one person and further traumatized American politics. It also triggered a flood of bullshit. The MAGA world rushed to take advantage of the shooting to remake Trump, who has essentially condoned political violence by vowing to pardon January 6 rioters, into a martyr of political violence and to portray Democrats as the perpetrators of such violence. It is a foul act but a true reflection of the black-is-white reality-denialism of Trump and and his MAGA following.
The cause of this tragic shooting has yet to be determined. But one thing is certain: Only one of the candidates in the 2024 contest incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to overturn an election and still threatens American democracy. What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, does not change that.
