Reckless Rhetoric and Its Consequences

In a Merion West op-ed published in January, I compared Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach to dealing with those who challenged his political power to what the Biden administration was doing to former President Donald Trump as we approached the November presidential election. As I saw it, the Biden administration and its allies were using the powers of government to hamstring President Trump by keeping him in court throughout the election season and further sullying his name in front of voters. Most importantly, I made the provocative point (echoed by Steve Bannon) that President Trump’s life could be in danger. (Tucker Carlson had also raised this concern.) I argued then that if former President Trump were harmed or even murdered, much of the mainstream press would promulgate the narrative that he brought it upon himself with his divisive rhetoric. Little did I know that my prediction would be proven correct just a few short months later.

As Matt Taibbi so eloquently articulated in 2020, from the moment President Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015, he laid bare the disconnect between average Americans and their legitimate grievances and the elite Washington politicians who were ignorant of their needs, as well as a commentariat that downplayed legitimate challenges affecting many in the United States. President Trump had not only diagnosed but wanted to address severe problems many working-class Americans were facing. Many in Washington, D.C. and in powerful roles throughout the country neither appreciated his diagnoses nor his recommended remedies. Something had to be done, but precisely what was hard to say.

Journalists, once the friend of the common man, could have reported on the root cause of the problems that so many Americans were enduring. Instead and despite promises to change, they decided to continue portraying President Trump as an aberration worthy of scorn and ridicule, an anti-Semite, a fascist, and an aspiring dictator. They also presented his supporters as uneducated and deplorable. They did this by quoting him out of context and creating news content best described as partisan creative writing. They showered him with metaphorical bullets. Moreover, the mainstream media obscured President Biden’s cognitive impairment for nearly the duration of his presidency until his disastrous debate, in which the entire world found out in real time the extent to which age had taken its toll on the incumbent.

On July 13th, at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks replaced the metaphorical bullets President Trump had thus far absorbed with real bullets. Crooks, who was shot and killed by the Secret Service at the scene, was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the person responsible for the failed assassination attempt on President Trump and the death of retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, a fifty-year-old rally attendee who was killed when he used his body as a shield to protect his family from the hail of bullets. (Two other rally attendees were injured.)