-
-
-
- Donald Trump posts an image of the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, on Truth Social on April 25, 2026. As occurs with every act or attempted act of political violence in the U.S., many have attempted to blame the rhetoric of their political adversaries for “inspiring” or “provoking” violence through their words. In the case of the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel, many Trump supporters are seeking to heap blame not only — or even principally — on the attacker whom President Trump described as a “lone wolf.” Instead, under a theory long used by liberals against the American Right, blame is being widely assigned to President Trump’s more vocal critics for allegedly “inspiring” violence against him. This theory alleges that by demonizing Trump with some of the worst accusations (saying he is a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a war criminal, etc.), liberals and other Trump critics are endangering his safety and implicitly, or even explicitly, offering justifications for trying to kill him.
While this framework of culpability may be understandable or appealing at first glance, it has an ugly and dangerous history. Every political faction has used it in an attempt to silence what are otherwise constitutionally protected ideas by conflating them with violence (“words are violence”). I wrote at length here about one similar effort, when liberals and various Democrats tried to blame leading conservatives for the 2022 Buffalo massacre due to their anti-immigration views, which were cited by the shooter as his motive. That article documented why this blame-shifting theory is so misguided and dangerous.
That Buffalo attack followed similar ones around the country. On May 14, 2022, an avowed white supremacist and anti-immigration extremist entered a Tops Friendly Market in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Buffalo and slaughtered ten Black Americans. The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, left a long manifesto identifying those he regarded as heroic and who inspired him (principally other mass shooters who targeted immigrants, Black people, and Muslims), and explained his reasons for deliberately targeting non-white people (focusing on “The Great Replacement Theory”).
In its wake, elected liberals and their media allies instantly — meaning: before the bodies were even removed — blamed the massacre on prominent conservatives who were opposed to mass immigration. Because these conservatives expressed views about immigration that were featured as galvanizing motives in the shooter’s manifesto, so this reasoning went, the “rhetoric” of those conservatives “inspired” the shooting, and they thus had blood on their hands.
There were countless examples of this tactic from prominent liberals. One who spelled out the underlying mentality most explicitly was Jamelle Bouie in a New York Times op-ed. In a column titled “The Slaughter in Buffalo Hasn’t Quieted the Great Replacement Caucus,” Bouie insisted (while denying that he was doing so) that leading figures on the American Right — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), then-Senate candidates J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Blake Masters (R-AZ), and Tucker Carlson — had blood on their hands. In particular, Bouie pointed to what he claimed were extensive similarities in rhetoric between “mainstream conservatives” and the shooter’s manifesto regarding immigrants and “replacement” theories:
Make no mistake: The idea that apparently inspired a white supremacist who is accused of killing and injuring more than a dozen people last Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo — that nefarious elites are using immigration to “replace” white Americans with pliant foreigners — is virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Republican rhetoric. “This administration wants complete open borders,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in an interview last month . “And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it really [that] they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?”
“The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall,” said J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, in a campaign ad . “They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country”….
Republican politicians aside, there’s also Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News program is a direct conduit for white nationalist ideas, including the idea of “the great replacement.” There are more than 400 episodes of his show, according to a recent Times investigation , in which Carlson has either amplified or promoted the theory that Democrats and other members of the liberal elite (like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros) are using immigration to replace the native-born majority with a new, foreign-born electorate. . . . They have chosen to swim in the same ideological waters as the people responsible for these shootings and have chosen to amplify the “great replacement” theory to the world even as it poisoned minds and produced violence…. It’s not as if this comes out of nowhere . It would not be the first time in this country’s history that reactionaries fanned violence in order to win a favorable settlement for themselves. [There is one major irony worth noting here. Despite Bouie’s accusations, none of the figures he named even appeared in the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. There was no evidence at all that the shooter even liked the GOP or had even watched or heard of Tucker Carlson. Yet Bouie still blamed them. By contrast, Saturday night’s WHCD shooter not only read the postings of Bouie himself and many other partisan Democrats (such as Will Stancil, Ken “Popehat” White, and Aaron Rupar), but he also “liked” several of their social media postings , including those that denounced Trump in harsh terms. In other words, there was a greater demonstrated nexus between those liberals and the WHCD shooter than there was between the Buffalo shooter and mainstream conservatives.] Similarly, many prominent Democrats in elected politics and media demanded that Special Counsel Jack Smith prosecute Trump for the violence that occurred on January 6 at the Capitol, based on the theory that Trump’s claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election, as well as his pre-riot speech on the same day, “inspired” that violence. As I often argued back then, such a prosecution of Trump on those grounds would not only violate the First Amendment by holding a citizen liable for constitutionally protected speech, but it would also destroy the vital separation between one’s words and the violent acts of others.
After that 2022 wave of attempts to pin the blame for the Buffalo shooting on others, I wrote at length about why that theory is not only fallacious but also how it poses a genuine threat to core concepts of free speech. There is basically no political or ideological faction that does not, at one point or another, spawn violent lunatics. But words are not violence. The difference between political rhetoric (even aggressive or accusatory rhetoric) and violent acts is a crucial one to ridigly maintain.
I will refrain from repeating the arguments in that 2022 article about the Buffalo massacre, but those who wish to read them can find them here . Suffice it to say, that article reviews the key reasons, the relevant cultural norms, and all the judicial precedents illustrating why it is so vital to heap blame solely on those who commit violence — rather than on those who express views, no matter how extreme, that are constitutionally protected and constitute a vital part of our political traditions of free speech and harsh criticism of political leaders.
As a result of that article I wrote attacking this liberal blame-shifting framework following the Buffalo massacre, I was widely accused in liberal tabloids like Salon (“Why is Glenn Greenwald defending Tucker Carlson and the ‘great replacement’?”) and elsewhere of defending the Great Replacement Theory and white supremacy. Obviously, I was doing nothing of the sort. I was opposing the attempt to blame people — legally, ethically, or politically — who use rhetoric and arguments for the violent acts of others. And I am doing the same thing now.
--- This blame matrix is no more noble or persuasive when used by the Right, which is precisely what is happening now. That the rhetoric of American liberals about Trump is responsible for the WHCD shooting is pervasive among Trump’s most ardent supporters, and it relies on exactly the same rationale invoked by Bouie and his ilk.
The pro-Trump journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon said on Sunday that “Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats.” As a result, she wrote, “it’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting.” Long-time conservative reporter Byron York wrote that the “gunman’s manifesto is anti-Trump social media come to life. Key declaration is straight out of Bluesky.”
The Trump official Richard Grenell argued that “the attempted assassin literally uses the exact language that CNN and their Democrat allies use every day to describe President Trump.” And the official White House social media accounts today posted this decree from Trump himself: “I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats is…. very dangerous. I really think it’s dangerous for the country.”
It is perfectly accurate to note that many of the denunciations of Trump found in the shooter’s manifesto are, indeed, often heard in mainstream liberal discourse. But what does this prove? It proves nothing beyond what was proven by the fact that many of the ideas contained in the manifesto of the Buffalo murderer are ones often heard in mainstream conservative discourse. None of that makes anyone responsible for violence by virtue of the fact that their expressed views overlap with some violent lunatic’s manifesto.
I fully realize that, especially in the wake of violent political attacks and the emotions they provoke, it is extremely important for whatever side or group feels targeted to believe that they are uniquely victimized by violent and hateful political rhetoric from their opponents or enemies. It thus makes people genuinely angry if one suggests that their party or ideological camp also uses hateful invective.
And, in the case of this weekend’s attempted assassination, it is of course true that many in left-liberal spheres employ hateful and aggressive rhetoric against Trump, his allies, and his supporters. But pretending that it is liberals who do that uniquely, whereas conservatives are typically restrained, sober, and cautious in their negative rhetoric about Democratic presidents and liberal politicians is, to put it mildly, not sustainable.
In many ways, Trump himself has gone as far as anyone when it comes to provocative and extremist rhetoric about his political opponents. The primary objection from conservatives over the last 48 hours seems to be that Democrats compare Trump to Hitler, which, they claim, is uniquely suited to provoking violence.
Liberals do, in fact, make Trump-Hitler comparisons, but they are by no means alone in the use of Nazi rhetoric. Indeed, in 2024, Trump told his donors that then-President Biden was running a “Gestapo administration.” Tea Party activists put up billboards in 2010 equating Obama with Hitler. In 2015, conservative Texas Congressman Randy Weber (R-TX) suggested that, at least in some respects, Obama was worse than Hitler. Biden, for his part, also accused Trump of using Nazi rhetoric. In 2024, Trump called Democrats who attack him “the enemy within,” and even “more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” And Trump spent years accusing Obama of being a fraudulent and illegitimate president by claiming that he was really born in Kenya but produced falsified documentation to prove he was born in the U.S. and was thus eligible for the presidency.
Rush Limbaugh and other leading conservative voices of the 1990s accused the Clintons of the most heinous crimes imaginable, from murdering numerous people (including Hillary’s “hit” on Vince Foster) to Bill Clinton’s alleged drug trafficking. Limbaugh also insisted that Obama was "America's number one national security threat" and posed more of a danger to Americans than any foreign country — accusations that could easily lead someone to conclude it was justified, even necessary, to eliminate that threat.
Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) warned then-President Clinton in 1994 that he was so hated on military bases that “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” (Helms subsequently apologized.) At a political rally in 2011, a man stood up for Tea Party favorite Rep. Paul Braun (R-GA) and asked , “Who is going to shoot President Obama?” Braun had himself repeatedly warned that Obama would usher in a Marxist dictatorship, while Obama, in the midst of all this vituperative rhetoric, had been the target of several serious assassination plots, including one disrupted by the Bush FBI .
The question is not whether one side’s rhetoric and accusations are true or false. That is irrelevant to the point here. Similarly irrelevant is the question of which side, at any given point, uses more caustic or demonizing rhetoric. The question is whether one is to be held responsible — not just criminally but morally — if one’s contemptuous rhetoric about and accusations against an American president or against an ideology coincides with the views that an assassin or would-be shooter cites among their motives for resorting to violence. The answer in all cases should be “no.”
It is a long-standing American tradition that politics entails harsh rhetoric and extreme accusations (true or otherwise) against leading American politicians, especially against presidents or presidential candidates. The more power someone wields — and nobody wields more political power than the President of the United States — the more permissive society should be of the use of the harshest rhetoric when condemning those political leaders. That sort of rhetoric is hardly a new or recent invention in American politics.
On CNN on Sunday, Dana Bash suggested to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) that liberal rhetoric about Trump may be spawning violence against him. When Raskin asked what rhetoric she meant, Bash replied: “that he’s terrible for the country and so forth.” Of course Americans have the right to argue that a president is “terrible for the country” or even more extreme criticisms. And we should never accept a standard that dictates that we must be muted and deferential when criticizing a powerful politician, lest we stand accused of having blood on our hands if someone tries to attack them.
There is no doubt that left-liberal politics in the U.S. has become more explicitly tolerant and even supportive of violent rhetoric in the Trump era. That has been true throughout the recent history of many other groups, including the American Right. There have been plenty of violent attacks that are at least adjacent to right-wing sentiments, from the 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, to several plots against President Obama, to recent massacres aimed at Black people , Muslims , Latinos , and immigrants .
But within the U.S. judicial system and in American political culture more broadly, those who are culpable and held responsible for violent acts in the name of a political end are those who perpetrate the violence. To erode that vital principle by blaming or even criminalizing otherwise protected speech is to chart a course that subjects every political view and faction to various forms of guilt, even though they did nothing beyond expressing constitutionally protected views.