Shortly after a 20-year-old gunman tried to kill former President Donald Trump last Saturday, a group of Republicans rushed to blame Democrats and the media to the shooting.
They include Ohio U.S. Senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. They also include Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Representative Mike Collins of Georgia even posted on X that the district attorney of Butler County in Pennsylvania, where the shooting took place, should bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden.
Everyone rushed to judgment in the hours after the shooting. Some did so before the shooter’s identity was revealed. But four days later, the shooter’s motives are unknown, and even basic information about his political views remain unclear.
But one fact seems clear: Two of Ohio’s most prominent players in the post-shooting accusation game have in the past compared Trump to that most pernicious fascist of them all — Adolf Hitler.
Spokespeople for Vance and Moreno did not respond to requests for comment on either man’s statements about Trump, whom they have previously opposed.
On Saturday, only two hours After the 20-year-old began attacking Trump, Vance turned to X to shift the blame to Biden.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote. “The Biden campaign’s central tenet is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump.”
In February 2016, Vance sent a text message to his former Yale law school classmate in which he made an even harsher comparison to Trump.
Vance said he was driving “I vacillated between thinking Trump was a cynical asshole like Nixon, who wouldn’t be so bad (and might even be useful), and that he was Hitler of America.”
Trump is facing federal charges of trying steal the election he losthe is called “finish” the Constitution he came to terms with his loss Political violence AND police brutality — and called his political opponents “vermin.”
By repeating – repeatedly – that immigrants are “blood poisoning our country,” the former president clearly rhymed with Hitler, who used the same metaphor several times to attack Jews and any other “race” he deemed inferior to “Aryans.” About Jewish men who “allow” Jewish women to marry Christians, Hitler said: “He poisons the blood others, but keeps his own blood untainted.”
It would seem that some of the rhetoric comes from Trump’s own words and actions. It would also seem that the rush to blame others for the shooting was really an attempt to scare people into not talking publicly about Trump’s anti-democratic behavior.
But for Moreno, Republican rival Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, the media and Democrats are to blame for last week’s shooting.
“They’ve been calling (Trump) Hitler for eight years,” Moreno said in a video his campaign published on X“The shooter is 20 years old. They’ve been telling him since he was 12 that (Trump) is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. If you could have shot Adolf Hitler in 1935, would you have been a good person or a bad person? That’s how (the shooter) saw it. It’s their fault. It’s their fault, meaning the Democrats, and it’s also the mainstream media.”
But on his Twitter account in 2016, Moreno himself compared Trump to Hitler. now deleted postThe future Senate candidate retweeted a poll featuring Trump and Hitler and added commentary.
“He attacked immigrants, tried to silence the press and appealed to the darkest part of human nature,” the statement said.
Moreno didn’t say which man he was talking about. But his operate of the present tense is telling, considering that Hitler had been dead for 70 years at that point.
Moreno’s spokeswoman was asked to provide examples of how the press has compared Trump to Hitler over the past eight years. She was also asked if Moreno was concerned that blaming the press and political opponents for the attempted assassination of Trump would mean painting targets on their backs, given that there are so many armed, unstable people out there.
She didn’t answer.
