On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) stated that accusing the two would-be Trump assassins of being “on the Democratic team” is “going to perpetuate the violence.” And 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is “inflammatory and often inaccurate,” and has been “explicitly violent”, but “When you say that you’re going to be a dictator on the first day, you are a threat to democracy, and I’m sorry if that sounds bad, but it has nothing to do with violence.”
Himes said, “There are no teams here. Nobody supports violence. And so, to say that two apparently crazy, disturbed individuals, who took a shot — maybe, we’ll find out on the second one what was going on — at Donald Trump is somehow on the Democratic team, what that does is, 350 million people in this country, people hear that, and somebody’s going to say, [doggone] it, we’ve got to go after the other team, and it’s going to perpetuate the violence. The other two things, you just talked to Lee Zeldin, who, I will tell you, having served with him, is one of the more reasonable members of the Republican Party, but he did two profoundly dangerous things: … [I]t’s really important to Republicans right now to make it seem like it’s all the same thing, when there is a radical difference between the language used by Donald Trump, which, as David Frum said, is both inflammatory and often inaccurate, and people saying that they believe that Trump is a threat to democracy. Why? Because Donald Trump said, I’ll be a dictator on the first day. When you say that you’re going to be a dictator on the first day, you are a threat to democracy, and I’m sorry if that sounds bad, but it has nothing to do with violence. And the second thing, I just want to make this point, Jake, the whole Lee Zeldin presentation — and I’m hearing it all day today — it’s all about whataboutism, well, they do it on the other side, too. We don’t, Jake, accept that from our three-year-old children as a moral defense, and yet that is the defense.”
Himes further stated that he doesn’t want the support of anyone who’s violent and violent individuals shouldn’t participate in politics, and that “disturbed people who are inclined to violence are going to find some motive to do what they want to do, and what we can’t do is start saying that this guy, who — either of them, the shooter in Pennsylvania or this individual apprehended in Florida, are somehow reflective of the party, especially when there is a massive difference…between the rhetoric used by Donald Trump and the rhetoric used today by the Democratic Party.”
He added that “we should all, as elected political leaders, be a little more careful about the language used.” He specifically stated that rhetoric during the debate around the Iraq War about then-President George W. Bush “destroying” the country and Democrats talking about taking the country back are examples of language that shouldn’t be used, and Trump has engaged in “explicitly violent” rhetoric.
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