Several mainstream media networks suggested that former President Donald Trump is responsible for the attacks against his own life.
MSNBC host Alex Witt asked if the Trump campaign will urge supporters to begin “toning down the violence,” suggesting that the 45th president is to blame for the assassination attempts.
“Do you expect there to be calls from within the Trump campaign to do that? Because he’s gonna reach out to his supporters and say let’s take this down,” Witt said. “We do not know, again, the source of any gunshots or gunshots. We do not know who is responsible for this. The whole thing has yet to be 100% confirmed from start to finish how this all played out.”
“But do you expect to hear anything from the Trump campaign about toning down the rhetoric? Toning down the violence? Or would that be atypical of the former president,” Witt continued.
MSNBC political analyst Elise Jordan replied, “Well, Alex, remember back to the assassination attempt from President Trump’s life and how there was talk of a new tone and then the Republican convention was, by Trumpian standards, muted, and it did seem like he was trying to take it down a few notches. But then by the end of the convention speech, we were back to where we started.”
“I don’t know how long this moment of unity for the country where we come together and we say, ‘I don’t want any political opposition to be under threat of violence. Any threat of violence we don’t want,’” Jordan noted. “I would love for us to have a unity-type moment, but I think it is probably going to be fleeting, as we have seen in the past.”
NBC’s Lester Holt made similar remarks, suggesting that “fierce rhetoric” from Trump’s campaign trail contributed to the assassination attempts.
“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio,” he said. “This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.”
CNN ran a segment featuring Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, where Caputo said, “There have been a few critical reports on the nightly news about the Trump campaign rhetoric while, in the Trump campaign’s eyes and Trump supporters’ eyes and in Trump’s eyes, the Democrats have something to answer for because they’ve been calling him a threat to democracy and they’ve been saying that democracy is on the ballot.”
CBS’s Kristin Johnson also blamed “inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail” for “more threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio.”
