Demonizing Democrats: Why an autocratic playbook is used to whitewash Trump’s violent rhetoric

Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace.

Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise, Brinkley said, spending the rest of his presidency trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He later worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trying, successfully, to de-escalate tensions between the U.S. and the USSR.

“Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” Reagan later told a confidant.

A few days after he left the hospital, Reagan wrote a personal note to then-Soviet leader Brezhnev saying he’d like to reach out and work together for “a meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.”

Do not expect that this attempt on his life will similarly “awaken” Donald Trump. Already, his surrogates are using the opportunity to demonize — and shut up — Democrats.

Republican Senator and VP running mate JD Vance was one of the first:

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

In other words, Democrats damn well better stop calling Trump and the people who support him authoritarians or point out the parallels between their policies and rhetoric and those of Nazis unless they want to be blamed for the actions of a random 20-year-old madman with the classic “bullied loner” profile of a school shooter wanting to die in a blaze of glory.

What an authoritarian thing to do. And it is intentional: the goal is to blow up the re-election plan that Joe Biden laid out in a speech just a few days before the shooting: to focus on Trump’s violent rhetoric, violent provocations on January 6th, and his years-long embrace of authoritarian violence.

They are trying to silence Democrats. To shut down the Biden campaign’s sharpest weapon against Trump and his neofascist rightwing MAGA movement.

Republican Senator and fellow VP wannabee Tim Scott also got the message, perhaps directly from the campaign or maybe he just saw an opportunity on his own to turn up the heat; he jumped right in:

“Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, on CNN with Jake Tapper, blamed “Critical Race Theory” for the shooting, saying that the study of historic anti-Black racism in American schools was responsible for the attempt on Trump.

Marjorie Taylor Greene took the opportunity to suggest Democrats are trying to start a second American Civil War, as if people on the left are buying assault weapons and organizing into militias:

“The left wants a civil war. They have been trying to start one for years. These people are sick and evil.”

Democrats, in other words, damn well better shut up right now about Trump and MAGA’s violent words and memes. Condemning Trump and the militias and racists who promote him is now off-limits: that’s rhetoric that will lead to a “civil war.”

Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins went straight for the jugular, tweeting simply:

“Joe Biden sent the orders.”

In that, he’s echoing Donald Trump’s prior claims that when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for the top-secret documents he’d stolen from the White House, President Biden was trying to use the opportunity to have the FBI assassinate him. Trump’s exact statement on Truth Social was that Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

Trump is now claiming it was “God alone” who kept him safe from death; so far, it looks and sounds like Trump, instead of choosing Reagan’s path to peace, will be claiming martyrdom and directing all the attention to himself. Just two months ago, in fact, Substack author Rohn Kenyatta warned of a scenario very much like this in his excellent LookingNWords newsletter.

Many hope that Trump and his followers will not continue to use this attempt on his life to blame Democrats for political violence in America, although social media is already afire with such memes.

As noted, the goal of Republican efforts now will be directed to getting the media to condemn Democrats whenever they point out the GOP’s embrace of violence, from January 6 to Trump joking about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi to the “very fine people” in Charlottesville.

If they choose to take the fascist response to a political bloodletting rather that Reagan’s de-escalation response, there is a well-trod path — laid out in the book Trump’s first wife said was on his bed-stand for years — that I very much hope Trump does not choose to follow.

Ninety-eight years ago this month, the echo of a similar martyrdom first appeared in Germany, an event I am connected to by only two degrees of separation.

On July 4, 1926, the Blutfahne, or “blood flag,” was unveiled at the second party congress of Germany’s National Socialists.

When Hitler had earlier led a march to overthrow the government of the state of Bavaria, storming the Munich capitol building with a mob, the police stopped them before they were able to get to the governor or any of the legislators; two people were shot by police and one, Andreas Bauriedl, knocked over and fell on a swastika flag where he died of his gunshot to the stomach.

The bloodied flag became a sacred relic for that authoritarian movement. They carried it to all their major political events; over time it took on, followers believed, a “spiritual vibration.” They called it the Blutfahne, or “blood flag.”

My mentor, Gottfried Müller, told me a story that I relate in the book I wrote about him, that, at a 1930s Nazi rally, he’d been among a group of young draftees who were led up to the stage to salute Hitler and touch the Blutfahne.

Müller later renounced Nazism and, immediately after the war, spent years traveling to German churches and civic halls with a Hasidic rabbi, Avram Pollak, preaching pacifism; he later started a series of peace-based nonprofits around the world, which is how I first met him. I helped start Salem (“Salem means ‘Peace’”) programs in the US, Israel, Colombia, Uganda, and a half-dozen other countries throughout the 1980s.

Flag consecration — using a flag, particularly one that was bloodied in battle — is a European military tradition that dates back to at least the 10th century. For example, a “blood flag” was famously used to lead a battle in Germany in the Talschaft (forest canton) of Schwyz in 1240.

There is even an American variation. In April 1871, former Union Army General and then-Congressman Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts gave a speech condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Rightwingers associated with the Klan claimed that he had waived the bloody shirt of a Black voting rights “carpetbagger” they had killed — which is where the phrase, “Waving the bloody shirt!” comes from.

Will Trump’s authoritarian movement continue with their pattern of echoing fascist and authoritarian language and behaviors (“poisoning the blood,” “vermin,” referring to Democrats as “the radical left”) by exploiting this attempt on his life?

Will there be a flag, shirt, or other relic touched with Trump’s blood or that of the supporter who died that becomes their movement’s Blutfahne?

Trump has already laid the foundation for such an effort: After his arrest in Georgia on charges of trying to steal the 2020 election, he had the suit he wore cut into tiny squares which were then sold online as if they were sacred relics.

As The New York Times noted last December:

“According to the NFT INT website, the suit is ‘priceless.’ There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.

“In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.”

We will find out — as Republicans meet in Milwaukee for their coronation of Trump — whether the GOP he now controls will try to elevate his previous calls for “revenge” and “retribution” against Democrats, using this incident as a touchstone. Or if they will use this attempt to try to use the media to block Biden’s re-election strategy of pointing out Trump’s own rhetoric.

Given how Trump, just four months ago, promoted on Truth Social an image of President Biden hogtied in the back of a pickup truck with a bullet in his forehead, this seems the most likely outcome, suggesting he’ll use the attempt on his life to increase his already-violence-drenched rhetoric.

Remember, back in 2016, Trump explicitly called for his “Second Amendment people” to take out Hillary Clinton before the election, saying:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”

There is speculation in the media that Trump will shift from his previous combative rhetoric to a Reaganesque call for national unity. He already has the GOP base, now fervent in the wake of this attempt on his life; his goal now will be to draw in swing voters “in the middle” by sounding reasonable.

Such a strategy would also help the GOP effort to neuter Biden’s attacks on Trump’s record and decade of promotion of violence.

So, will they use this event as an opportunity to renounce Vance’s, Greene’s, and Scott’s rhetoric, to repudiate authoritarianism, and to return their party to Reagan’s post-shooting embrace of bipartisanship and world peace?

Or are they going to continue driving the GOP down the fascist road by exploiting this event to both “wave the bloody shirt” and shut up Democrats?

Will the media jump on the bandwagon and condemn Democrats and Biden for normal campaign rhetoric while continuing to normalize Trump’s violent past?

Will Biden and his campaign — and progressive media — be cowed by the phony GOP calls to tone down the rhetoric?