JD Vance attacked Democrats earlier this week for calling Donald Trump a “threat to democracy” after an apparent second assassination attempt on his life Sunday.
The Republican vice presidential candidate’s remarks Monday came the same day the former president blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ “rhetoric” as the reason he had been “shot at.”
Trump’s running mate even went so far as to suggest the lack of assassination attempts on Harris’ life shows Democratic rhetoric has been more dangerous and warned that calling an election opponent “fascist” could lead to violence.
“We can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and that, if he’s elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy,” said the Ohio senator.
What he forgot to mention is that Trump has repeatedly called his opponents just that, often in extravagant broadsides in which he’s called Harris a “Marxist” to boot. During Tuesday’s edition of CNN NewsNight, host Abby Phillip cut to a compilation of Trump doing exactly what Vance said needed to stop, over and over again.
“This is communist, this is Marxist, this is fascist,” Trump says in one clip of his Democrat opponents. “She’s a Marxist, she’s a fascist,” he says of Harris in another.
Trump paradoxically states in one of the clips CNN pulled that, if Harris wins, Americans “will be living in a full-blown banana republic ruled by an anarchy and a tyranny.”
Have Democrats called Trump a threat? Yes. On CBS Sunday Morning in August, Biden called Trump a “genuine danger to American security,” Harris has repeatedly called him “a threat to our democracy,” and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, asked at a July 27 appearance “Are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Are they going to take our rights away? Yes.” At the same appearance, Walz even alluded to Republicans as “fascists” who “depend on fear.
So, if Vance’s claim that politicians need to “tone down the rhetoric” is to be heeded, he may need to speak to his running mate, who has used the very talking points he has condemned, for months and more frequently than his opponents.
