“By constantly calling President Trump an existential threat to democracy and comparing him so often to Hitler, many in the press need to be held accountable for demonizing his millions of voters and tilling the fertile soil that produced Crooks and others like him, yet to surface.”
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 50-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.)
As I predicted, within 24 hours, my social media feeds were ablaze with Trump critics upset that Crooks was not a better marksman and claiming that President Trump had brought the assassination attempt upon himself. Some also favorably reacted to musician Kyle Gass saying on stage “Don’t miss Trump next time.” On Substack, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich feigned sympathy for President Trump and called for an end to political violence. But like others in the media, Secretary Reich posited that there was a “direct and alarming connection between Trump’s political rise and the increase in political violence and threats of such violence in America” but that “today is no time to dwell on [it].”
Turning Secretary Reich’s argument against him, I would argue that many news outlets of the print and cable news variety are responsible for sowing the seeds of Trump hatred that paved the way for the attempt on his life. MSNBC even had to cancel today’s segment of Morning Joe, presumably unable to trust that its anchors could control their hatred for the former President for even a day. In 2016, Washington Post journalist Shalom Auslander asserted that his readers should not compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler because the comparison “belittles Hitler.” In 2023, Aaron Blake, also a Washington Post journalist, reinforced the idea that President Trump is the modern-day equivalent of Hitler, and entertainer Linda Ronstadt has compared Trump’s presidency to living in Nazi Germany on CNN.
There are many sides to the story regarding violent rhetoric—and who is responsible for it. By constantly calling President Trump an existential threat to democracy and comparing him so often to Hitler, many in the press need to be held accountable for demonizing his millions of voters and tilling the fertile soil that produced Crooks and others like him, yet to surface. Despite his disingenuous call for unity last night, President Biden’s divisive rhetoric is part of this same problem. On their X campaign page, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in May that President Trump was, like Hitler, trying to create a “unified Reich” in a potential second term. When you compare your political opponent to perhaps the most evil man who ever lived and suggest he would rule the United States as a dictator, it is no surprise that someone would take it upon himself to try to neutralize that threat. The reality that President Trump may have—along with so many others—contributed to our nation’s unrest and divisive rhetoric notwithstanding, it is time for Americans to appreciate fully both the press and the Left’s complicity in our current national state of affairs and to vote accordingly.
Tony D. Senatore is a graduate of Columbia University, and, in addition to contributing periodically to Merion West, he maintains a blog at The Times of Israel.
