Donald Trump Jr. called out corporate media and Democrats who, in the wake of an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, are equivocating and victim-blaming Republicans for the political violence and bloodshed.
“The leftwing media and Democrat political hacks are actually trying to ‘both sides’ some psychopath attempting to assassinate my father,” the former president’s son said in a post to X on Sunday.
“Just when you think these people can’t get any lower, they always do!!!” he added.
For years, corporate media and far-left Democrats have compared Donald Trump to Hitler and framed him as a “threat to democracy” and to the American way of life itself. Democrats have gone on television and called for Trump to be “eliminated.” President Joe Biden himself has repeatedly called Trump a “dictator,” including on the day of the assassination attempt.
Yet, following the assassination attempt, left-wing talking heads were quick to point the finger at Trump and Republicans — apparently concerned about the former’s president’s reaction to almost being shot to death and potential retaliatory violence.
After a bullet appeared to narrowly miss his head, and with blood pouring from his right ear and smeared across his cheek, Trump took the time to emerge from his Secret Service detail before being whisked away to safety, to show Americans he survived the attempted assassination. Video captured the former president pumping his fist defiantly in the air as he shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”
“I do want to say, there was one thing that, when I watched the tape, I found odd, because of all of the heated rhetoric, and that is, that, after he was hit, former President Trump got up and said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ I think what we’re hearing from people is, that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to tamp it down,” CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel said in reaction.
Host Dana Bash said Saturday on CNN’s coverage of the attempted assassination Trump that “just in the past few years,” we’ve seen political violence in a very nefarious way.
She said:
I mean, Nancy Pelosi’s husband was at home sleeping and somebody went into his house with a hammer and hit him on the head with it. In 2016 people died, 13 injured, including the congresswoman who is just holding an event for her constituents. I’m talking about Gabby Giffords. And so this is obviously a much different scale, a much different point in time. This is a man who was president who wants to be president again. But the notion of violence and the rhetoric and the intense anger that people are feeling bubbling up into violence is is something that has been happening over the years and it’s not just going back to 80s or even to the 60s.
ABC host Martha Raddatz said Sunday on “This Week” that former Trump’s “first instinct” was to say “fight” after an attempted assassination, to which co-hose George Stephanopoulos said, “You’ve traveled around the country talking to voters in this deeply divided nation. In some ways, this is a horrific symptom of the underlying division in this country.”
Raddatz said, “It certainly is, George. I’m sure that will probably continue. We saw President Trump raise his right hand, as Jon just described, and we’ve seen those pictures. But we could also see him say, ‘Fight, fight.’ That was his first instinct.”
Stephanopoulos also said that Donald Trump and his supporters have contributed to “violent rhetoric” while discussing yesterday’s assassination attempt on the former president.
Stephanopoulos said, “Of course, President Trump and his supporters have contributed to this violent rhetoric as well.”
David Frum, a prominent “Never Trump” pundit and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, published an article on Sunday in the Atlantic blaming former President Donald Trump for his own attempted assassination.
“Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well,” Frum wrote.
“It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history,” he continued. “That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence, as their defining political message in the election of 2024.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.