Should we stop calling Trump a threat to democracy?

A man carries an AI-generated image of Donald Trump carrying cats away from Haitian immigrants.

Sept. 17, 2024 3 AM PT

Hello, and happy Tuesday. There are 48 days until the election, and thanks to yet another unglued individual with a semiautomatic weapon, we have sunk deeper into the quagmire of political upheaval.

Ryan Wesley Routh, who was spotted by Secret Service agents as Donald Trump played golf on one of his Florida courses over the weekend, was charged with two gun felonies Monday and is suspected of plotting to assassinate the former president. Ironically or maybe sadly, at least one of those gun charges — being a felon in possession — will be under constitutional scrutiny after Trump’s ultraconservative Supreme Court majority crippled gun control laws beginning in 2022.

Meanwhile, the city of Springfield, Ohio, is under siege. Springfield, of course, is the town in Sen. JD Vance’s state about which he started the false story that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating people’s pets. He threw more dung on that bonfire of refuse by alleging that these legal immigrants, who have been instrumental in boosting the city’s economy (and who are his own constituents), have also brought in disease and crime.

That has led to actual threats — 33 of them so far. By Monday, nearly two dozen institutions had been closed, evacuated, locked down or searched because of bomb and shooting threats. The list includes City Hall, the Clark County Department of Family Services, Clark County Board of Elections and at least nine schools or universities.

The Haitian community (as well as the Black community in general) is afraid, and the situation has devolved so far that Gov. Mike DeWine announced that state troopers will start doing daily bomb sweeps of local schools.

All of which raises the question, should we all just shut up for the sake of peace and safety?

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw holds a photograph of items found near where the suspect was discovered.

The violence isn’t over

The bad news about the current state of political violence in the United States is that there will probably be more of it.

Since 2016, when Trump began his campaign of white Christian nationalism, stoking fear of a “great replacement” in which white Americans would be subjugated by immigrants of color, that violence has been inevitable. It was 2018 when Trump referred to Haiti and some other nations as “shithole” countries, reportedly saying, “Why do we need more Haitians, take them out.”

That actually seems tame by today’s measure. Now he slams people, not nations. Rapists, murderers, lunatics, animals. He makes it personal.

Eight years of demonization, dehumanization, desensitization and denial. That’s the foolproof diet for growing an average Joe into a political vigilante, and Trump and crew has mastered how best to serve that meal, steaming hot and full of lies.

The aim is to create enough fear and anxiety to garner votes. But for some, that terror — whether in agreement or opposition — seems greater than what a ballot can fix.

“It starts with the weakest individuals who are just looking for a reason to act out,” Monty Marshall said. He’s the director of the Center for Systemic Peace and studies how democracies rise and fall.

And indeed that is what we have seen — remember David DePape with his hammer and unicorn costume inside Nancy Pelosi’s house?

These would-be assassins and attackers are largely amateurs with disorganized beliefs, lone wolves disenfranchised and confused by their isolation long before they picked a target.

DePape swung wildly between left and right, living in a garage on the fringes of society and trading beliefs seemingly as often as underwear. Routh was once a Trump supporter, before becoming obsessed with the conflict in Ukraine, even traveling there on some sort of self-assigned mission.

That doesn’t make them less dangerous. In fact, they are terrifying because they are alone, yet many. There are more such men out there, and as the pressure builds on democracy, it also builds on them.

But it’s the Democrats

Republicans have once again jumped at the opportunity to frame Democrats as the aggressors when it comes to inciting violence, though. They are demanding that — with two assassination attempts on Trump in recent weeks — Democrats stop calling him a threat to democracy.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), known among other things for claiming that “Jewish space lasers” caused California wildfires, posted on X Monday that “Democrats and their partners in the mainstream media are responsible for the attempts to murder President Trump. Their rhetoric has not been unclear. They have placed a target on President Trump’s back, and many have outright called for his execution.”

Trump took the same position on the debate stage days ago, claiming, “They talk about democracy. I’m a threat to democracy. They’re the threat to democracy.”

But of course, Trump is a threat to democracy. He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the last election was stolen from him, and has already — before a single ballot has been counted — started laying the groundwork to claim a rigged election again if things don’t go his way in November.

The first time he tried to reverse a lost election by force, he bumbled and fumbled. But as Marshall pointed out to me, most authoritarians flop at their first insurrection. It’s the second and third tries that are worrisome.

“Almost all people who attempt a coup and succeed have previously attempted a coup and failed,” Marshall said.

But the assassination attempts do put pressure on Democrats to parse their every word, because Democrats love to fret.

Trump, on the other hand, is “the one person who is escalating the rhetoric constantly in order to remain on the cutting edge,” Marshall told me.

So when MAGA Republicans call for calm, they are really just trying to further hobble Democrats with their own decency. It’s not really about preventing violence. Because at the same time, MAGA Republicans continue to escalate with lies like those told about Springfield.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said on CNN recently. He then claimed he meant only that he was focusing the story, not making it up.

Meanwhile, forever-Trump tech bro Elon Musk tweeted, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” as if it were a dare. He later took the post down and called it a joke.

It wasn’t funny, any more than Vance’s lies weren’t intentional. And that kind of two-faced attack is dangerous, because we are being told if we take it seriously, we are the problem.

But democracy is at risk, and being cowed into polite silence won’t save it.