That old sourpuss, Sen. Rand Paul, is bellyaching that the foes of America’s very own Prince Charming, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, need to quit being mean to the old boy.
Paul, R-Bowling Green, cited the two recent assassination attempts on Trump’s life as his rationale for clamping down on the sort of rhetoric permeating this year’s presidential campaign that, he fears, could ultimately result in tragedy.
Appearing on Fox News (where else?) on Sept. 17, Paul blamed CNN, MSNBC and “all the other left-wing outlets for promoting this idea that Donald Trump is going to end elections, that democracy is being threatened, it’s going to be the end of the world.”
Trump’s critics, he said, “are actually advocating and pushing people toward violence and they need to stop that kind of rhetoric.”
“They have made it so dire and so misinformed the public about Donald Trump’s positions that every crazy person in the country now is ginned up,” Paul said. “So CNN, MSNBC the Democrats in general need to tone it down because they are inciting this anger that’s coming forth through disturbed people or violent people or otherwise. But they need to tone down their rhetoric without question.”
Now, let’s be clear – assassination attempts are nothing to laugh off. Such drastic action can only be justified in the most extreme of circumstances – the attempt of Rommel and others to take out Hitler on July 20, 1944, is a good example – but there is no justification, at all, for any attempt on Trump’s life, politics or no politics.
But placing responsibility for the assassination attempts on left-wing rhetoric, thus developing an opening to censor common political speech, is baseless. You can search far and wide on the internet or wherever you desire, and you won’t find anyone on the left, right or center who thinks Trump should be shot.
Yet Paul insists that certain parties are “actually advocating and pushing people toward violence,” a claim that, in a less polite society than the one we live in here, would be characterized as a damned lie. Blaming the existing political speech on the two dreadful incidents, one of which resulted in the death of a rally attendee, is detestable and is being advanced by not only Rand Paul but the likes of Trump’s own running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-PA, in an apparent attempt to divert attention from the missteps of Trump’s own struggling campaign.
Trump, the professional grievance maven, also places the onus on opposition rhetoric, telling Fox reporter Brooke Singman that the shooter in the initial attempt on his life believed the attacks from his Democratic foe, Vice President Kamala Harris, “and he acted on it.”
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out,” Trump said.
The Trump statement shows that Paul is guilty of, among other things, selective hearing. He hasn’t objected on the many occasions Trump has dipped into the age-old right-wing tactic of red baiting, characterizing Harris at various times as a socialist, a Marxist or a fascist eager to lead the nation down the tubes.
He calls her Comrade Harris.
The problem Trump faces is convincing voters he is being unfairly cast as anti-democratic given his past actions. Democrats and the networks Paul derides as left-wing have an easy task – use Trump’s history against him. All they have to do is cite his continued insistence that the 2020 presidential election, where he lost to President Biden by about 7 million votes, was “rigged.” The evidence he presented to show the election was stolen from him was laughable. He pressured his then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College results and instigated a mob assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2024, threatening the well-being of members of Congress in what generally has been described as an insurrection.
Now, if he’s returned to the White House, Trump has indicated he will use the Justice Department to get back at his political enemies and tear the workings of the Executive Branch asunder.
Ironically, in his interview on Fox, Paul said of those using combative rhetoric to assail Trump, “They need to say this is about election, win or lose, it’s about a process we do every four year and it shouldn’t be about alarming and exciting people.”
You mean like Trump in 2020?
You know, Rand, if you don’t want anyone talking about Trump being a threat to democracy, maybe he ought not do things that are a threat to democracy. Trump’s own actions validate the fears and justify the legitimate claims against him. I don’t know about you, but he doesn’t sound like a great advocate for American democracy to me.
While Paul and others try to sell the notion that rhetoric almost killed Trump, he might want to focus his attention on the real threat involved in both cases – guns. Both alleged perpetrators apparently had mental health issues, yet they had no problems gaining access to weapons whose only exist is to kill people. Both have been described as AR-style, semi-automatic rifles that can hit a target hundreds of yards in the distance. These attempts didn’t result from rhetoric. They were made possible by guns no one should own.
Whether Trump can actually lay waste to American style democracy despite his obvious loathing for the system is debatable. Being no MAGA man myself, I’ve lived through the assassinations of the Kennedy boys, the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, the Days of Rage and the constructs of the Weather Underground, all of which seemed at one point or another to spell doom for the republic. If one lesson is to be learned from all that it’s this nation is amazingly resilient.
But even if American democracy proves able to survive a second Trump term, it doesn’t mean he won’t do tremendous harm to the body politic that could extend for years beyond his subsequent departure.
Nowhere, it should be noted, did Paul manage to note that Trump himself might want to moderate his own rants. No attempts, as far as we know, have been made on the lives of Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. But you can bet, if past is prologue, they’ve received plenty of threats throughout the campaign that have been handed over to the FBI.