‘Eliminate Him’: A Look at the Violent Rhetorics against Trump

While the attempted assassination of Donald Trump has been roundly condemned by his political opponents, liberal politicians and pundits have – implicitly and explicitly – called for his death before.

Trump narrowly avoided death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, when an assassin’s bullet apparently clipped his ear as it whizzed past his head.

The shooter – named by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – killed one spectator at the rally and wounded two others before he was shot dead by Secret Service agents.

US President Joe Biden decried the attempt on Trump’s life, declaring that “there’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”

Ever since Trump won the 2016 election, however, he has faced a steady stream of threats from members of Biden’s party and their allies in the media.

Off with his head

Hollywood celebrities reacted with outrage to Trump’s shock defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. 80s pop icon Madonna spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House;” actor and activist Peter Fonda called for the president’s youngest son, Barron, to be “put in a cage with pedophiles;” and comedienne Kathy Griffin grabbed headlines when she posed for a photoshoot holding a mockup of Trump’s bloodied and severed head.

Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments in 2020 when she warned Trump and his “trumpers” to “walk lightly,” or else her “soldiers” would “make them pay.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used similar rhetoric last week when she declared that the upcoming presidential election “is not a normal election,” and that Trump “must be stopped. He cannot be president.”

Two weeks before the shooting, BBC reporter David Aaronovitch wrote on X that if he were President “Biden, I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security.”

On Sunday morning, Aaronovitch said that he had deleted the tweet, claiming that his words were “clearly satirical.”

A threat to democracy

Biden’s response to Saturday’s shooting was one of unequivocal condemnation.

The US president, who will face off against Trump in this November’s election, said that he was “praying for” his political opponent, and that “we must unite as one nation to condemn” political violence in a post on social media less than a month earlier,

In a post on social media less than a month earlier, however, Biden’s team described Trump as “a genuine threat to this nation.”

“He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for,” they posted on the president’s social media accounts. While Biden has never explicitly wished physical harm on his opponent, at least one would-be assassin has used similar words to justify his plans to kill Trump.