Heated Rhetoric As Republicans Blame Biden For Trump Shooting
Within hours of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, his Republican supporters in Congress claimed they knew exactly who was responsible: Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Biden’s campaign “rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Senator J.D. Vance, on Trump’s shortlist for vice president, alleged shortly after Saturday’s shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which the former US leader was wounded and one bystander killed.
Vance’s comments were part of an escalating chorus of Republicans who have pinned the blame on Democrats — even as the FBI says it has yet to identify the shooter’s ideology.
They also heap more fuel onto the fire in a political atmosphere that has long been tense and fiercely polarised.
“Heated rhetoric has come from both sides” in recent years, Michael Bailey, a political science professor at Georgetown University, told AFP.
Republicans, for whom gun rights and a rejection of alleged government overreach are key themes, “have been more prone to marry such rhetoric with imagery related to guns,” Bailey noted.
“And some of them (including Trump) did not cover themselves in glory when they made light of the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband,” he said, referring to the 2022 attack by a conspiracy theorist on the high-profile Democrat’s spouse.
Trump later mocked the Pelosis, and stoked further conspiracy theories around the assault.
