"It's shocking": Experts ring the alarm on a "kind of dissonance" following thwarted attack on Trump

Even though the two would-be assassins were reportedly both former supporters of Donald Trump whose subsequent politics can be best described as murky, President Trump and his supporters are now blaming the Republican nominee's political opponents for the recent assassination attempts against him. Trump accused both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, of taking "politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred." His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, claimed that the two attempts on Trump's life compared with none on Harris' is "pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out."

"Somebody’s going to get hurt by it, and it’s going to destroy this country," Vance warned. 

Perhaps an even more powerful Trump supporter, billionaire Elon Musk, similarly wondered in a since-deleted tweet why "no one is even trying to assassinate" Harris.

Significantly, Republicans have offered no specific examples of violent rhetoric from Harris or any of her mainstream supporters, grasping instead to conflate campaign language with incendiary speech. 

By contrast, experts who spoke to Salon saw an ominous precedent in Trump's words — namely, an attempt to intimidate political dissenters by linking them to violence against state leaders.

Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies," told Salon that the criticisms of Trump and his supporters reflect a "kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn't connect to reality." Finchelstein specifically pointed to "the idea that the person that has promoted violence through rhetoric, and even sometimes the glorification of that violence, the idea that that person can complain about the 'rhetorical violence' of his enemies. It's shocking."

When asked about political leaders who have engaged in similar tactics, Finchelstein observed that Trump "does this kind of thing again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler." The former and possibly future president "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."

Ronald Collins, a former law professor at George Washington Law School and current editor of the weekly online blog First Amendment News, mentioned a different historical figure when describing the rhetoric of Trump and his anti-dissent backers. "Given Donald Trump’s unhinged temperament and his blistering and often unfounded attacks on any who are not subservient to his views, I do sense a dangerous Stalin-like streak in the man," Collins told Salon, referring to Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin.

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist and political scientist who authored "The Missing Middle," told Salon when asked about the comparisons to Hitler that "there are resemblances, especially when demonization happens. Or calling groups enemies or unclean." At the same time, Skocpol cautioned against Americans turning solely to foreign examples for the dangers of Trump's rhetoric. "During recurrent periods of nativist politics and/or at times of ideological extremism, opportunistic politicians have repeatedly used rhetoric demonizing entire groups of people – racial groups, German-Americans during WWI, liberals in the McCarthy era – so Donald Trump is replaying an old strategy," Skocpol said. "It is very dangerous, we already know from earlier episodes with him, because lone actors can grab a gun or bomb and kill innocent people. Social media makes this approach much more effective in misinforming and arousing millions of people."

Noting that America's founding fathers "believed and hoped that political leaders would care about the public good" and "saw people like Trump as corrupt threats and tried to create a Constitutional system to rein them in," Skocpol concluded that even though violence has no place in democratic politics, Trump and his backers are not really trying to stifle violence when they falsely connect it to political criticism. "Tough arguments and calling it like it is are not the issue," Skocpol said. "Democrats and others who see Trump as the threat he is need to keep saying why. His effort to silence criticism is off base and he will do more than argue if he regains state power."

UCLA School of Law Professor Eugene Volokh was more understanding of Trump's rhetoric, characterizing it to Salon as "just speech, itself protected by the First Amendment" and "more comparable to other contestable claims about how 'toxic rhetoric' from one side or another caused an increase in political violence, and how people should stop especially harsh criticism." Volokh added that "there’s something to such calls to turn down the heat, though of course they do seem less credible coming from someone who harshly criticizes his own adversaries."

Volokh also rejected the premise that Trump is following Hitler's playbook.  "Isn’t comparing your political adversaries to Hitler and the Nazis itself 'demonizing' them?" Overall, Volokh said, each side in America's current political debate is guilty of both inflammatory rhetoric and (arguably un-self aware) calls for their opponents to cool off their own words. "More broadly, our political debate is full of people, Left and Right, who label their opponents Communists, Nazis, etc.," Volokh argued. "It’s also full of people who fault the other side for harsh speech that, the theory goes, stimulates criminal attacks by some small portion of the audience. The one thing that they have in common is that they generally condemn their adversaries for harsh rhetoric, but not their friends."

Former President Trump's National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Salon in response to this article, "It's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

Finchelstein perhaps best summed up the contrasting opinion — namely, that Trump and his time are quantifiably and qualitatively different and worse than the Democrats in this regard — through his analysis of Vance.

"Vance is a prop," Finchelstein said. "He will use whatever fantasies are out there to promote Trump's aims and desires."

"Then, of course, there is the context in this country, I would say an epidemic, of people out there trying to use violence against different politicians."