Who Normalized Political Violence in America?
LEE SMITH
It wasn’t Donald Trump, or Joe Biden
.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama walk to their vehicles upon arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City on March 28, 2024
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Democratic Party officials and media deny that there’s any connection between their inflammatory rhetoric labeling Donald Trump a fascist, would-be dictator, and even Adolf Hitler and the attempt on the 2024 Republican candidate. But media executives must believe Trump supporters have a point or MSNBC wouldn’t have given Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski a 24-hour timeout Monday to put some distance between the shooting and the fare that Morning Joe has been dishing out for nearly a decade. Same with music industry executives who canceled Jack Black’s worldwide music tour after the funnyman’s bandmate told an Australian audience that his birthday wish was “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Politics aside, no concert promoter was going to pay the insurance premium required to host a band that celebrated attempted murder.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are angry at The New Republic after a recent issue put an image based on a Hitler campaign poster on its cover. The editors claim they weren’t entirely committed to the Trump=Hitler formula, but, as they wrote, “he’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
In a way, left-wing journalists who say it’s not their fault the 20-year-old man whose adolescence was saturated with murderously anti-Trump rhetoric tried to kill Trump have a point. The media is reactive, not creative. Democrat-aligned media didn’t invent the idea that the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidate was, despite massive video and audio evidence to the contrary, cognitively 100%. They just sang from the sheet they were handed.
And when Joe Biden proved incapable of finishing a sentence without devolving into gibberish during his debate with Trump last month? It wasn’t the media that left him out there to melt like a Madame Tussauds simulation of a living person. In fact, the media was embarrassed by Biden’s performance—and in front of the people they hate most, Trump supporters, who have been saying for four years that Biden is in obvious decline. So, the media reacted—Joe must go! But that’s not their call. If media personalities had real power, no one would have dared muzzle Joe and Mika, not even for 24 hours.
Lending the government’s executive authority to an information operation contending that half the country supported a foreign agent was designed to destabilize America. Its purpose was to drive its citizens against each other.
So, who created the climate of political violence?
Some propagandists lay the blame squarely on Trump. After pro forma denunciations of the attempted public execution of the opposition leader, a chorus of establishment stalwarts, like George Stephanopoulos, and David Rothkopf, and others argued that Trump and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory,” wrote David Frum, “are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”
In other words, not only is Trump responsible for inciting January 6—the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, etc.— but he has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately responsible for the attempt on his life. That’s Hamas logic: The violence of our victims drove us to burn them alive. Thus, the left is laying down the predicate for future violence against Trump and the half of the country that supports him: It’s OK to target them because being “at both ends of the bullet’s trajectory,” they brought it upon themselves.
Frum et al. are not just trying to evade responsibility for the serial lies that have immersed the American psyche in third-world thinking—The Atlantic contributor is one of Russiagate’s preeminent media impresarios—but to establish the predicate for future violence against Trump and the half of the country that supports him: It’s OK to target them because they’re all “at both ends of the bullet’s trajectory.”
No, the violence came from the left. The question is, who from the left is responsible for cultivating it? It’s not the media, and it’s not Joe Biden, either.
With the Democratic Party’s internal upheavals about replacing the incumbent, the left has openly acknowledged that the shadow presidency isn’t a MAGA conspiracy but fact. All the party’s chatter centered on Obama, identifying him as the man holding the party’s reins and directing its messaging: Did he sign off on George Clooney’s op-ed calling for Biden to step down? What was the true meaning of Obama aide David Axelrod’s tweet that the debate over Biden’s candidacy should have happened a year ago? Or when another Obama hand, David Plouffe, said it was DEFCON-ONE moment for Biden? Who did Obama prefer for 2024: his former vice president he made the 2020 candidate or the unelectable also-ran he slipped into the No. 2 slot to sneak her past the electorate when Biden’s malfunctions proved, finally, irreparable? Was the moment ripe for Operation Kamala?
As it happens, the timing backfired on Obama. The attempt on Trump’s life leaves him holding the bag. If Obama is responsible for calling the shots, then he must also be held accountable for them.
It’s no surprise that the left’s investigation into the roots of our current round of political violence has carefully avoided mention of the riots that filled college campuses across the country and the streets of American cities with Palestinian terror advocates. Indeed, the fascist-fighting New Republic now employs a pro-Hamas reporter. “Good morning,” Talia Jane tweeted over a picture of Israel’s border being overrun on Oct. 7. This wasn’t terrorism, she explained, rather it was “state oppression vs rebellion against state repression.”
In an article for TNR, Jane defended: antisemitic protesters at a Manhattan exhibit commemorating the hundreds killed by Hamas at the Nova festival; vandals targeting the homes of Brooklyn Museum administrators for calling the police on violent protesters; attacks on pro-Israel Columbia University professor Shai Davidai; and terror supporters filling a subway car asking other riders to “raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” It could have been dictated from a Doha hotel hosting Hamas leadership.
But Jane’s ideology is not that different from the message Obama pushed into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. “The occupation, and what is happening to Palestinians, is unbearable,” is how he framed the Oct. 7 massacre for his former staffers during a Pod Save America panel in November.
And this wasn’t just talk. How did 2024 Brooklyn come to look and sound like 1938 Berlin? In part, according to U.S. intelligence officials, it’s because Iran funded and incited the pro-Hamas demonstrations. Where would the regime that arms and pays for anti-American terror and embodies Jew hatred get the idea that it’s OK to participate in the American political system by creating the conditions for a nationwide pogrom?
In 2015 the Obama White House struck an agreement with the Islamic Republic, legalizing its nuclear weapons program and thereby legitimizing the tactics it employs to accomplish its strategic goals—political violence, i.e., terrorism. The Iran nuclear deal was the instrument with which Obama normalized political violence.
Another Obama instrument cultivated it. Shortly before leaving office in 2017, Obama instructed his CIA Director John Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment claiming that Vladimir Putin helped put Trump in the White House. The purpose of the official assessment wasn’t just to undermine his successor’s presidency and hobble his administration with phony investigations sourced to the perverted fantasies of an FBI informant once employed by British intelligence. No, lending the U.S. government’s executive authority to an information operation contending that one half of the electorate supported a foreign agent to govern the country was designed to destabilize America. Its purpose was to drive its citizens against each other.
That’s where we are today, still. These are the signs of a destabilized polity: the widespread prosecution of political opponents that was normalized in the wake of Jan. 6; mandating vaccines and villainizing those who resisted experimental medical treatments; recasting Trump supporters as domestic terrorists; opening borders to usher foreign criminals into middle-class communities; convicting elderly women for praying in front of abortion clinics; dispatching the FBI to raid the home of the opposition leader, unlawfully deputizing an officer to prosecute him, and most recently, but likely not summarily, the attempt on his life.
Trump said that, after what he went through, he couldn’t very well say the same words he’d planned to say Thursday night in a broadside attacking Biden. Rather, he needed to send a message of unity—which in this case is a story about redemption.
Americans know how to hear those stories because we’ve been telling them to ourselves and others from the beginning, starting with George Washington himself. The narrative thread goes through the Civil War, catching Lee as well as Grant, and up to the present. It seemed once that Obama, too, having attached himself to the mythography of Lincoln, was part of that story as America’s first Black president—and maybe he will reappear there in the future, rather than leave his mark in the book of America where it is now, in the chapter of Ahab, the maniacal completionist. The best stories we invent about ourselves all partake of the same longing, from Shane and Gatsby to Rocky and the Hunger Games. May this latest and perhaps most improbable protagonist of the great American story continue to draw on the source of redemption granted him by providence.
Lee Smith is the author of The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President (2020).
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