On the flight home from our family vacation on Saturday, my phone lit up with messages about the horrific and thankfully unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at his rally in rural Pennsylvania.
In the wake of that awful event, several GOP leaders scrambled to give their take. Rolling Stone has a good roundup of those making the predictable but dubious theological claim that Trump survived because of some special divine protection. I’m going to come back to these ex post facto theological claims it in a future post.
Robert P. Jones
Today, however, I want to focus on the response from Trump’s pick for his vice presidential running mate, J.D. Vance. Since Trump’s election in 2016, Vance has shown himself to be cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Trump and has, like so many others, set aside his former criticism of Trump to kiss the ring of power.
Here is Vance’s indignant spin, posted on the app formerly know as Twitter: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
But, wait: In 2016, Vance himself worried aloud to an old Yale Law School friend that Trump was a “demagogue” and might be “America’s Hitler.” Here’s a set of Facebook messages where Vance makes these claims, which were reported by Vice News in 2022.
I think most people are not very ideological, and Trump, while I find him loathsome, touches a legitimate nerve. You should read David Frum’s piece in the Atlantic on the Republican revolt. But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working-class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect.
I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?
Setting aside both Vance’s hypocrisy and the fact that Biden has never called on his supporters to stop Trump “at all costs,” Vance’s statement is ripped straight from the twisted authoritarian playbook. He blames those who are calling out and criticizing Trump’s frequent and actual antidemocratic, authoritarian and violent rhetoric for the violence.
Never mind that Trump brazenly says he rejects “turning the other cheek” in favor of an “eye for an eye.” Pay no attention to the fact that Trump has been openly conducting a campaign of grievance with the repeated promise, “I am your retribution.” Ignore his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants who Trump describes as “less than human” criminals and “vermin.” And let’s not mention that the shooter was a white male registered Republican wearing a T-shirt of a popular YouTube channel that focuses on firearms and often features AR-15s, the military style assault weapon he used (and the weapon of choice for many mass shooters).
“Vance’s disingenuous rant is a rhetorical ploy to make Trump’s critics hesitate before sounding the alarm about the dangers he genuinely poses.”
In short, Vance’s disingenuous rant is a rhetorical ploy to make Trump’s critics hesitate before sounding the alarm about the dangers he genuinely poses to a pluralistic democracy in America. We can’t fall into that trap.
We have to remain clear-eyed about where the real threat to our security and democracy lies. Today, that threat disproportionately lies with Trump’s MAGA movement, which has taken over one of our two political parties, and with Vance who is now aiding and abetting it. These conclusions are backed up by clear evidence.
For example, a nationwide review recently conducted by ABC News identified 54 criminal cases “where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault.”
Here are just two examples:
After a Latino gas station attendant in Gainesville, Fla., was suddenly punched in the head by a white man, the victim could be heard on surveillance camera recounting the attacker’s own words: “He said, ‘This is for Trump.'” Charges were filed but the victim stopped pursuing them.
When police questioned a Washington state man about his threats to kill a local Syrian-born man, the suspect told police he wanted the victim to “get out of my country,” adding, “That’s why I like Trump.”
The ABC News story also noted that their research “could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.”
“Republicans are 2.5 times more likely than Democrats to support political violence.”
Public opinion polling also shows how support for potential political violence has seeped into the attitudes of rank and file Republicans under Trump.
Since March 2021, across 10 national surveys, PRRI has tracked potential American support for political violence. In PRRI’s 2023 American Values Survey, PRRI found nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” up from 15% in 2021. (In April 2024, our most recent survey, overall support for political violence dipped a few points to 19%, but it is still elevated compared to 2021.)
Notably, support for political violence is not evenly distributed across the population. Across all surveys, we find a consistent pattern. (All numbers below are from PRRI’s 2023 American Values Survey.)
- Republicans are 2.5 times more likely than Democrats to support political violence. One-third of Republicans (33%) believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats.
- Even among Republicans, you can see the influence of the MAGA movement. Republicans who hold favorable views of Trump are nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump (41% vs. 16%, respectively) to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.
- More than three in 10 white evangelical Protestants (31%), compared to no more than one quarter of any other religious group, agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country. Notably, church attendance has no mitigating effect on support for political violence.
Support for political violence is also strongly correlated with several tenets associated with Trump and the MAGA movement:
- Americans who believe Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen are more than three times as likely as those who do not believe that the election was stolen from Trump — 46% to 13%, respectively — to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.
- Among those who affirm the so-called Great Replacement Theory that immigrants are invading the country and replacing real Americans, and among those who understand America to be a divinely ordained promised land for white Christians, support for political violence rises to four in 10 (41% and 39% respectively).
- Using PRRI’s four-part measure of Christian nationalism also reveals those who are sympathetic to Christian nationalism are at least twice as likely as other Americans to believe political violence may be justified. Nearly four in 10 Christian nationalism adherents (38%) and one-third of sympathizers (33%) agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with only 17% of Christian nationalism skeptics and 7% of rejecters.
The patterns are crystal clear, as is the danger. We can’t let political violence be used to silence concerns about democracy and rising political violence. Calling out threats to democracy is not inciting violence; rather, it’s an act of patriotism that invites our fellow citizens to protect a society that ensures pluralism, equality, and security for all.
Robert P. Jones serves as president and founder of PRRI and is the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.
This column originally appeared on Robert P. Jones’s substack #WhiteTooLong.
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Don’t blame ‘the media’ for reporting your own violent language | Opinion by Rick Pidcock
Trump needs to be stopped with ballots, not bullets | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Let’s not return to the political violence of the past | Opinion by Richard Wilson