Trump Alleged Assassination Attempt: How Toxic Rhetoric Fuels Violence

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, this election season, we can confidently say is like no other, with Trump’s indictments, Biden bowing out, Kamala Harris stepping in, and now, an apparent second assassination attempt against Trump at his Florida golf course. Presidential historian Timothy Naftali talks to Walter Isaacson about this weekend’s troubling event and what it says about American politics today.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Tim Naftali, welcome to the show.

TIMOTHY NAFTALI, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Thank you very much, Walter.

ISAACSON: It’s been an incredible political year, all sorts of twists and turns, but the most unsettling have been these violent turns. Now, we’ve seen the second assassination attempt against President Trump — Former President Trump. Tell me what was going through your head when you heard that this week.

NAFTALI: Well, initially it was, oh, God, not again. It was traumatic. The first time someone attempted to assassinate President Trump in — Former President Trump, in July was traumatic. It was reminiscent of the worst moments in our political history. And for something similar — fortunately the attempted assassin did not get a shot off this time, but for something similar to have occurred was equally traumatic. It raised questions in my mind, first of all, about the Secret Service’s ability to protect Mr. Trump, but it also reminded me of how we live in a tinderbox, a political tinderbox. Our political environment is so fraught. It is so toxic. That disturbed minds — we don’t know a lot about Mr. Routh, but the material — the information that’s coming out about this second wannabe assassin is that he seemed to trouble — another troubled individual, but the — we live in a climate that is so fraught that it literally provokes the troubled among us to do terrible things.

ISAACSON: I just want to clarify as we speak that the investigation is ongoing and to a suspected assassination attempt. The climate is fraught, but it’s partly fraught because of the political rhetoric. You’ve said that these incidents feed off of a desperate and intractable polarization in which apocalyptic language is used to demonize both sides of the political aisle. Let’s start with the just rhetoric. Is that one of the things adding to this?

NAFTALI: I’ve spent a little bit of time studying the Kennedy years and in trying to figure out Lee Harvey Oswald a long time ago, people didn’t have the — didn’t understand the concept of self-radicalization. But as a result of 9/11, and of the challenge against international terrorism, people have begun to understand how individuals can be radicalized by what they read and what they see. And we have experienced piece of technological change that you’ve written so notably about, Walter. We have seen even more opportunities and more platforms with the kinds of information that will push people who are already unwell, over the edge, to actually use — maybe to take — to actually create the violence that they’re watching on screen. And I’m not a psychologist and I don’t play one on television, but if you look at the history of many of the would-be and successful assassins, political assassins in our country, many of them were self-radicalized. So, the language we use in the political sphere to describe those we disagree with matters.

ISAACSON: Let me quote you that President Trump said that the would-be assassin acted on highly inflammatory language of the Democrats. And he’s blamed it on the Democrats. And J. D. Vance said, no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last two months, and two people have now tried to kill Donald Trump. I think it’s a pretty good evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and cut this crap out. To what extent is it something that’s happening more on the Democratic side, this demonization, or is it a both sides phenomenon?

NAFTALI: I think the effort to spin this horrific environmental problem in one direction or another only makes it worse. We need to only ask Mr. Pelosi about the consequences of extreme rhetoric on the right. And so, let’s just — could we have the political version of a ceasefire about saying, which side is more responsible for this language? There is no doubt in my mind that in July it was important for Democrats, as well as Republicans, to tone down the language. The president of the United States made a — I think, a very pointed and excellent speech, where he talked about the importance of bringing down the volume, bringing down the temperature. And I would argue that the — sort of at the core of the Harris campaign is a desire to turn the page. And she’s using — particularly her running mate, is using humor to try to weaken Donald Trump’s appeal. The whole concept of the weirdness factor. So, I would argue that we’ve seen, certainly on one side, some reduction in the apocalyptic language that was around in July. This isn’t — by the way, this is not to say that any political candidate deserves to be treated with violence. In our country, violence is unacceptable as a way of resolving political disputes. I mean, after all, in the 19th century, we saw the consequences of trying — of using violence to settle disagreements. So, I don’t think, Democrats or Republicans should be held responsible for the acts of madmen.

ISAACSON: There’s something deeper though going on here, I think, and you’re a historian that has specialized in many times in the 1960s. You were director of the Nixon Library, you studied Watergate, you also studied Kennedy Cuban Missile Crisis. And back then, and you’ve cited him, there was a great historian, Richard Hofstadter, who talked about the paranoid style in American politics, and I know you’ve used him in your own work. Tell me about this paranoid style and whether this conspiracy notions that are bubbling up again are part of a cycle in American history.

NAFTALI: When Richard Hofstadter wrote a wonderful piece about the paranoid style, it was 1963 and it was before Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. The first time he gave a speech and then, of course, he rewrote it afterwards and it was published after the Kennedy assassination. But he was describing the edges, Walter, of our political community, the edges, and the edges were these extreme views. And he went through our history and he mentioned different small groups. We call them third-parties who had unusually conspiratorial views, the people who worried about Mason’s, the anima sonic party, the people worried about immigrants. And he explained that in our political culture, there is the capacity for conspiratorial thinking, and that it’s also always there. It’s like bread in the bone. But one thing that he made clear was that it was the outer edge, and occasionally it moves closer to the center. He was concerned about a group called the John Birch Society, which is very far-right, very anticommunist, a group of people who thought that Dwight Eisenhower was an enemy of the United States and somehow a tool of the Soviets. And he worried about the effect they were having on the Republican Party. They supported ultimately the nominee of the Republican Party in 1964, Barry Goldwater. Although, Barry Goldwater himself was not a captive of such conspiratorial thinking. But my point in bringing this up is that he was talking about the outer edges. We are living in a political moment, Walter, when those outer edges are at the center of our politics.

ISAACSON: What’s bringing them to the center of our politics then?

NAFTALI: Well, I would say that Donald Trump and the leadership of the Trumpist Republican Party has done that. They have both responded to anger

outside of Washington, and they’ve helped stir that anger. There is — there are conspiratorial thinkers on the left, there’s no doubt about it,

but they’re not at the center of the Democratic Party.

ISAACSON: Do you think that social media has helped bring it to the center of our discourse?

NAFTALI: There’s no doubt about it. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, look, the way you would communicate these ideas in the 1960s was through pamphlets. And you can see the pervasiveness of these pamphlets, but that was a slower way of basically of spreading toxicity. We have an instantaneous way of doing it now. And look at the way that people use not only memes, but little snippets of video to drive home dramatically a certain point of view. Most recently in discussing this horrific lie about immigrants eating pets.

ISAACSON: Let me push back a little, because we’ve had for a whole year Democrats sort of saying, all of democracy is threatened in this election. I mean, isn’t that a bit over the top to say, somebody’s going to destroy our democracy?

NAFTALI: Apocalyptic language never serves us very well. We live in an era where outrage is used to fuel political campaigns, actually to fund them. And anybody watching now will know that they’ve received requests to contribute money and it’s always the most extreme. So, we do live in an era of outrage. I do believe that apocalyptic language is not in the interest of the country. We’ve got to keep in mind that there’s always another election. And that and then if you lose the election, you’ll have another chance. And you don’t want to take the ball home with you. You don’t want to destroy the football field. If you lose, you lose, you move on. In 2021, Donald Trump did something that no predecessor of his that every even thought to do, which was to contest a peaceful transition of power, in a sense giving license to a lot of Americans to say, hey, you know what, if I don’t like the outcome of the election, maybe it was fraud that caused that election outcome. Maybe it really didn’t happen. So, we are in a dangerous moment where — and the left has used this apocalyptic language. I would argue though that January 6th should leave an indelible impression upon all of us, that very divisive language can lead to violence on a grand scale.

ISAACSON: You’ve talked about how when a greatest generation was in power, a generation that had gone through World War II together, the Depression together, there was more of a sense of common purpose, and yet, you’re a historian of the 1960s. And when you look at this period, it sort of reminds me of the 1960s, including the riots and the divisions in the streets but also the theory of a deep state and, you you know, you didn’t know Watergate and Nixon stuff, he believed that they, the paranoid, deep state was out to get him. Don’t you see parallels?

NAFTALI: Well, I want to — there are two points about this. Of course, there are certain parallels. But there are real differences. First of all, after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April of 1968, the House passed with bipartisan support, the Fair Housing Act, which is the third great civil rights act of the 1960s. Republican members of the House, including George Herbert Walker Bush, voted for this civil rights act. Not simply because Martin Luther King had been assassinated, but also out of a sense of fairness to Americans of color who were serving in Vietnam. There was a sense of a joint bipartisan sense that we’ve got to do better. This is amidst the swirling issues that you raise. There was still a possibility among elected officials to work together and set a national tone to show that we were better than we’ve been before. I just don’t see – – with the exception of the infrastructure bill, I don’t see this bipartisan capacity to set a better tone at the highest level. Elite opinion is not the most important thing, but it matters. And we have a very divided elite. Now, the other parallels, of course, the very fact that in 1968 you have a president who could have run again, who decides not to run again, steps aside because of a very unpopular war. But that unpopular war is quite different from Israel’s war with Hamas. Americans were fighting the war in Vietnam. It was a much more — the effects on us as a people were much graver. I’m not suggesting that the humanitarian side of the — you know, Israel’s war with Hamas doesn’t matter, I’m just saying that as a political challenge, it was — didn’t reach as deeply into the American soul and psyche and politics as did Vietnam. So, you had Vietnam, which was certainly dividing us. But the country’s leaders were still able to make changes. They weren’t paralyzed by this chain — by what was going on, by the social and cultural revolution that was going on around them. Whereas, I feel right now, we are stuck. And when you have one of the two political parties that is so animated by conspiracy thinking, basically taking the paranoid style from the outer edge of our politics, right to the center of it, it makes national conciliation harder, not blaming everything on the right. But I am saying that we have seen a shift towards more conspiratorial thinking, and that is mainly on one side and not the other. It shouldn’t be on either side.

ISAACSON: Tim Naftali, thank you so much for joining us.

NAFTALI: Thank you, Walter.