The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump stunned the nation. But what was most shocking was that it wasn’t as surprising as it was expected to be. For months, politicians, media outlets, and pundits on both sides of the race have been escalating their reckless rhetoric, including claims that Trump was trying to subvert democracy, unleash “death squads,” and assassinate gays and reporters. “disappear.”
President Biden has fueled this angry rhetoric. In 2022, Biden gave a controversial speech in front of Independence Hall in which he denounced Trump supporters as the enemy of the people. Biden recently referenced the speech to support his claim that this may be the last democratic election.
I discuss this angry rhetoric in my new book, An Essential Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage. We are living through an angry age, not the first, but perhaps the most dangerous in our history.
Some of us have been objecting for years to this angry rhetoric as a political argument that is dangerous to the nation. While most people reject this exaggerated claim, some accept it as true. They believe that gays will be “extinct,” as ABC’s “The View” claims, or that Trump’s “death squads” have been approved by a conservative Supreme Court, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claims.
Anger is addictive and contagious. It is also liberating: it gives people the freedom to behave in ways that would normally be considered unpleasant.
As soon as Trump was elected, crazed outrage became the norm, with footage of Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head.
Just recently, another celebrity, actress Lea DeLaria Pleading with Biden “Blow” [Trump] In response to the recent presidential immunity decision, Delaria explained, “This is a f**king war. This is a f**king war. We’re fighting for our f**king country, and these motherfuckers are trying to take it away. They’re trying to take it away.”
For months, people have heard politicians and media outlets refer to Trump as “Hitler” and the Republican Party as a Nazi movement. Some have said stopping Trump would be akin to stopping Hitler in 1933. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) declared that Trump “is not only unfit to serve, he is a subversive of our democracy and must be removed.” He later apologized.
Some say that if Trump is not stopped, he “will destroy the world.”
I don’t believe that politicians and commentators who engage in what I call “angry rhetoric” in my book seek actual violence, but they are deliberately creating the conditions that breed extreme views and, of course, extreme actions.
While the media has been quick to condemn reckless rhetoric from the right, they have largely ignored the same rhetoric from the left, including threats against conservative Supreme Court justices before the start of Congress. Assassination Plot Against Brett Kavanaugh.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) took to the steps of the Supreme Court and specifically denounced Kavanaugh: “To Judge Gorsuch, to Mr. Kavanaugh, you created a storm, and you will pay the price. If you continue to hand down these terrible decisions, you never know what’s coming at you.”
Again, I don’t believe Schumer wanted Nicholas Roethke to go to Judge Kavanaugh’s home and kill him, but these politicians also know that to some Americans, this statement will sound like a justification for violence.
So when the president claims the election may end the country’s democracy, it sounds like both a warning and permission, especially when he adds, “We’re done talking about debates. It’s time to put Trump at the center of the target.”
We still don’t know who committed this assassination attempt, but we know all too well that crazy people can find legitimacy in the incendiary rhetoric of politics. This moment did not occur in a vacuum, but at a time when our leaders had long since abandoned reason in their anger.
We’ve come full circle back to where we began as a republic: in the election of 1800, Federalists and Jeffersonians engaged in similar angry rhetoric.
Federalists told the nation that if Jefferson were elected, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest would be openly taught and practiced, the air would be rent with the cries of the grief-stricken, the earth would be stained with blood and the land would be black with crime.”
Jefferson’s supporters warned that if Adams was re-elected, citizens would be “summarily executed” by “chains, dungeons, exile, and perhaps the gallows.”
Both sides stoked public anger and fear, leading to violence across the country.
In this age of anger, politicians have been exploiting that same anger and fear to garner support at all costs.
This is the cost.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “Essential Rights: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
