Trump Tries to Close Off a Chief Line of Attack: That He’s a Danger to Democracy

Since the election to the Presidency of Donald J. Trump and his supporters have depicted a country teetering on almost unimaginable despair. 
 
The United States is under ‘under invasion’ from ‘thousands and thousands and thousands of terrorists,’ Mr. Trump said in a speech to thousands of supporters in Las Vegas on Friday. What is happening to the babies, They are ‘executed after birth. ’America is threatened with a ‘nuclear holocaust. ’ 
 
Three days later, after facing his second assassination attempt in two months, Mr. Trump raised what has become an all-too-common American problem: political orators and impassioned rhetoric and oratory. Not his — that of his rivals. 
 
“Their words are making me receive bullets and am the one who will be liberating the country,” Trump told Fox News Digital. 
 
It is more than what one man said but a mere regurgitation of a script that any common politician can perform. For years, the Democratic Party has stated that Mr. Trump’s autocratic tendencies, his increasingly menacing declarations to incarcerate opponents, his attempts to reverse the 2020 election, and his unwillingness to pledge conformity with the rules of the next election makes him a physical embodiment of a threat to American democratic principles. There are numerous dire calls for another four-year Trump administration and also calls for the vote and rejection of Trump’s presidency in the next elections. 
 
Now, in the latest means of trying to suppress Democrats of one of their most significant sources of criticism against him, Mr. Trump is already trying to paint his foes as instigators of an escalating political tension that he himself has contributed to. 
 
Writing in a tweet on Monday, Mr. Trump said, “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” 
 
On Monday, the Trump campaign shared with media clips of Biden, Harris and other Democrats labelling Trump as ‘a threat’ to democracy, basic liberties and the country. The list was enormous and contained the one apparently most frequently quoted by Republicans – “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye”—said Mr. Biden. The president after the first attempt on Mr. Trump’s life has admitted to it being ‘a mistake’ to use that language. 
 
The attack isn’t new. From the onset of the campaign Mr. Trump has claimed that the Democratic party is the one that poses the greatest threat to democracy. He has complained Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris manipulated the legal system against him- Four criminal cases have been laid against Mr. Trump and he was found guilty on thirty-four counts – to portray those legal actions as political vendetta. 
 
But he has not left behind his lies about 2020 election fraud and has demanded that the people arrested in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol which he egged the mob into perpetrating should be freed as they are ‘hostages’ and ‘political prisoners. ’ 
 
Such methods are part of a signature playbook Mr. Trump returns to when he is accused of wrongdoing: He uses the exact same slur when accusing his opponent of the same. 
 
“He projects,” Pelosi said in the University of Wisconsin on Monday. “He says, ‘Crazy Nancy’ — he is crazy. ” “And he uses ‘Crooked Hillary’ — he is crooked. Every word he chooses is all about him. ” 
 
When Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, called Mr. Trump a “puppet” for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump fired back: Instead, she paused and said jokingly, “You’re the puppet. ” 
 
When, for example, Mr. Biden’s campaign attempted to label Mr. Trump as a ‘lifelong racist,’ the former president responded by saying that he was glad to finally be called a racist of any sort in order to be associated with such a ‘very nasty and vicious racist’ like Mr. Biden. 
 
In the recent weeks on the campaign trail, Trump has tried to do the same with a new line by the Democrats claiming the president and his supporters are “weird”. “We are not weird,” he uttered out loud in one of the rallies in Las Vegas. 
 
And at the presidential debate last week, Mr. Trump answered the claim that he would “weaponize” the Justice Department by accusing Ms. Harris of doing the same thing. 
 
“They talk about democracy. I’m a ‘threat to democracy. ’ They’re the threat to democracy,” he said. 
 
These are some of the severe tones deployed with an election fought on claims tha the two sides are fighting for issues that are critical, and they have contributed to the politicisation of violence. 
 
Bias has been expressed in threats, harassments and violent acts against lawmakers both republican and democratic including the gunshot wound Representative Steve Scalise received during a congressional baseball team practice session, an incident involving the husband of Ms. Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, an attempt to break into the Capitol during the certification of the Electoral College votes, an attempt on the life of Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin and multiple other cases of intimidation against election workers, judges and officials. Late last month, a man from Virginia was arrested for threatening to kill Ms. Harris severally on social media following her emergence as likely the Democratic party’s presidential candidate. 
 
Approximately 25 percent of sitting presidents have experienced serious efforts to assassinate them, says Matthew Dallek, a historian with the George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies who is writing an analysis of failed 20 th-century U. S. presidential assassination attempts and related political violence. 
 
However, as Mr. Dallek pointed out, what is quite strange with the two attempts on the life of Mr. Trump is that they occurred at a time when the United States was in the middle of a presidential election characterized by a contest on the viability of the American Dream. 
 
“The country feels like it is in danger of breaking down in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect other attempts on presidents’ lives,” he said. “In the middle of this more and more heated presidential campaign we are witnessing a debate on who is guilty What is the threat to democracy?” 
 
This most recent assassination attempt occurred when the president was playing golf at one of his golf clubs in West Palm beach Florida, just a week after a very unimpressive performance by Mr. Trump in a debate where he faced off with Ms. Harris. This time on the stage a clearly furious Mr. Trump underlined a regular fake news that spread by him and his vice-candidate from Ohio, Senator JD Vance, that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. These allegations have made the town and the entire Haiti community living in it tense with local GOP officials finding it hard to reassure people with threats of bombs in several places.

The Democrats encouraged Mr. Trump and his supporters to stop aspiring to deceive the public, pointing out that it is wrong” and shouldn’t be allowed in America, according to Mr Biden. 
 
On Monday, Mr. Vance used the assassination attempt to divert attention from Democratic criticism of him in relation to the promotion of fear in Springfield and urged the Democrats to turn to the tone to Mr. Trump and republican and at the same time increase his allegations that they were responsible for the two attempted assassinations. 
 
In a 1,200-word social media post Monday night, Mr. Vance called the Democrats ‘censors and moral extortionists,’ painting a picture of a world where conservatives are the oppressed victims of an elite liberal American ‘deep state’ determined to shut them up by any means possible. 
 
“Now, if one rejects censorship he rejects political violence,” he commented. “The logic of censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: ‘should have put a bullet in his brain. ’ ‘ All the Democratic candidates, including Mr. Biden, eagerly denounced an attempt on the life of Mr. Trump expressing that there is no room for violence in America’s political life. 
 
In her speech to an association of Black journalists on Tuesday, Ms. Harris continued to denounce political violence. However, she reserved the harshest criticism for the immigrants in Ohio that were described by Mr. Trump; she dismissed such comments as ‘hateful’, which THEY were founded on prejudice. 
 
“For when you are privileged to hold a mic that is that big, there is a great responsibility in that,” She said. She said, “You cannot occupy a position of standing behind the seal of the president of the United of America to utter such a shameful and hateful language which as usual is intended to divide this country. ”