In the wake of the recent assassination attempt on former President Trump, CNN anchor Jake Tapper solemnly decried the hateful rhetoric roiling our country. Perhaps Tapper should look in the mirror when he delivers such lectures.
Tapper is regarded by other mainstream media journalists as being “respected” and supposedly moderate in style. Yet for years, he has compared Trump to Hitler, claiming, for instance, that his anti-immigrant rhetoric could have come straight out of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
A desperate left, worried about its impending loss of power, prestige, and plunder, has settled on depicting Trump as a fascist.
When Trump was defeated in 2020, Tapper solemnly intoned that for millions of Americans, their “long national nightmare” was finally over.
It would be one thing if Tapper’s rhetoric was an outlier or if he were considered a voice from the fringe. But Tapper is well within the mainstream of the left-leaning media and is now being lionized for “jeremiads against political violence.”
Tapper pointed out the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) by a crazed loner and the beating of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, again by a crazed homeless man. In so doing, Tapper was indirectly blaming conservatives for these events.
But what Tapper did not do was point out the violent rhetoric that may have motivated the shooting of Trump. Please recall that when Giffords was shot, the sheriff most responsible for not detaining the shooter made sure to blame conservative talk radio, a silly charge to which the partisan media immediately leaped.
A disgruntled left-leaning hothead committed the one politically motivated shooting in recent years when he targeted Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). However, the partisan media did not attribute this violence to harsh leftist rhetoric. Instead, they blamed the conservative side for the violence. According to Politico, “violence is normalized across the spectrum.” In other words, the media suggests that conservative violent rhetoric justifies physical violence by the left.
This back-handed opinion seems to blame conservatives for leftist violence. But putting aside Jake Tapper for a moment, is there any truth to the idea that progressive rhetoric is the cause of a violent ecosystem?
Let’s go back to Trump’s election in 2016. Quickly, comedian Kathy Griffin, sensing the prevailing zeitgeist, was pictured triumphantly with the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump held in one hand.
Around the same time, in New York’s Central Park, a highly touted performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” featured 24 senators stabbing not Caesar, but Donald Trump, to loud cheers from the audience. The media reported favorably on the “resistance” throughout the remaining four years of Trump’s presidency.
Since the 2020 election, the Biden administration has done everything possible to strike fear into the public over MAGA members, terming them “white supremacists” and referencing white, male Christian nationalists. President Biden, with no immediate danger in sight, made a melodramatic televised speech to the country, excoriating supposed MAGA extremists amid a dystopian funereal setting.
Along with this rhetoric, congressional Democrats and erstwhile Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger conflated the January 6 election protests, which clearly got out of control, with an “insurrection,” which they certainly were not.
This election year, a desperate left, worried about its impending loss of power, prestige, and plunder should Trump win, has settled on depicting Trump as a fascist, specifically likening him to Adolf Hitler. MSNBC pundit Nicolle Wallace has stated her serious concern that if Trump is elected, the country will never hold an election again, portraying Trump as an authoritarian would-be dictator.
A recent edition of the New Republic proudly featured a Trump likeness morphing into — you guessed it — Adolf Hitler. The jejune, sophomoric cover story made the argument that, based upon various points of comparison, yes, Trump is a fascist.
No prominent voice on the left has denounced the New Republic, Jake Tapper, or Nicolle Wallace. No one has called a halt to extreme anti-MAGA rhetoric. No one in the mainstream media has condemned the foiled assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, following repeated illegal harassment of him and other justices, which the Biden Department of Justice condoned.
There is no secret to this. If it is repeated incessantly that Trump is the second coming of Hitler, those who take rhetoric literally may feel compelled to assassinate him. Why should we be surprised that an impressionable young man, imbued since 2021 with the accusation that Trump is a treasonous insurrectionist, would attempt to eliminate this “threat to democracy”?
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