Making Trump a martyr

Senator J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, wrote this on social media about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump: "Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination."

That is false: three essential words that need to be repeated continually in this age of unreality in which we live.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at the ballot box.

You save democracy by voting.

Expect a tsunami of MAGA Republicans to echo Vance's despicable slur and blame Biden. This horrible moment is too good a political opportunity, especially for a movement that, taking its guidance from the top, has never had much decency to begin with.

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana said: "Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop."

Incendiary rhetoric? Violent rhetoric? What a stupendous feat of projection—itself an enduring hallmark of the deranged right. There is only one side—only one candidate—with an actual record of incendiary and even violent rhetoric, over and over and over, and it isn't Biden.

Let's be clear. The searing magnitude of Trump's manifest unfitness for office, and threat to democracy and the Constitution, is the greatest danger our national polity has faced since the Civil War. That reality needs to be hammered continually. Doing so isn't an incitement to violence; it's an incitement for the American electorate to rise up and ensure by voting that such an unfit human being never gets close to the Oval Office again.

This tragic incident makes the job even harder, but we mustn't let up. Not for a moment. Every time you hear a MAGA apologist blame Biden for violence, use it as a reminder of what we're up against.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.