It’s Not ‘Incitement’ to Call Trump a Threat to Democracy. It’s The Truth.

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

It didn’t take long after reports surfaced of a gunman just outside Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Florida, for the horrible news to be used to score partisan political points.

Details are still sketchy — little is known about the motivations behind the apprehended suspect aide from the assumption that he was (shocker) unhinged and held an eclectic suite of political beliefs, ranging from support for Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats in other races, and a Nikki Haley – Vivek Ramaswamy ticket in 2024.

He was perhaps most actively an avid supporter of Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion. In many ways, the foiled plot appears similar to the attempt on Trump’s life from earlier this summer, in which a disturbed teenage gunman who police say had searched for the location of President Joe Biden ended up targeting Trump when he came to his home state of Pennsylvania.

Regardless of motive, this appears to be the second time in less than two months that a gunman sought to assassinate the former president, marking a dark and terrifying return to a climate of political violence in the United States after decades of relative peace.

The reactions to this tragedy have predictably fallen along partisan fault lines. Boosters of Trump have claimed, comically, that this is the result of violent rhetoric from Democrats, including those who say Trump is a threat to democracy (totally ignoring Trump’s long history of violent and incendiary rhetoric and the fact that he himself says anyone who criticizes him, from Biden to the New York Times , is a threat to democracy).

Those boosters are not worth taking seriously. Brit Hume, however, is. The veteran Fox News analyst is one of the more thoughtful conservative commentators out there, and he put the case against the Democrats in its best form on X, formerly Twitter.

“If Donald Trump is held responsible for Jan. 6 because of his allegations that the 2020 election was stolen, is it unfair, after two assassination attempts, to hold responsible the Democrats who have ceaselessly claimed Trump is a threat to democracy?” Hume asked.

Syllogistically, it seems like a very easy argument to follow. By comparing the blame Democrats place upon Trump for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6 with the blame Republicans place on Democrats for the attacks on Trump, Hume seeks to make the case that both are a consequence of rhetoric.

The problem is that the comparison makes no sense. It is a brazen false equivalency that flat-out ignores the fact that what caused Jan. 6 — Trump’s false election claims and his continued spouting of them — is precisely the threat to democracy that Hume invokes.

Crucially, the difference between Hume’s examples of inciting claims is simple: one is true, and one is false. The claim that fueled Jan. 6, that the 2020 election was stolen, is false. If it were true, few would criticize Trump for complaining about it. It was not true.

For those who need a quick refresher, over the past four years Trump has claimed the election was stolen from him through massive fraud. He has never supplied evidence that these allegations were anything more than “bullshit,” as his own Attorney General Bill Barr dismissed them.

It wasn’t just Jan. 6, either. Trump tried in a number of ways to overturn a democratic election extra-judiciously. He pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the electoral college certification, which he thankfully refused. Pence has since come out as a Republican refusing to support Trump’s bid for re-election, noting that his former running mate could not be forgiven for putting his individual gains above the Constitution. It’s a rare principled approach among Trump’s ex-allies and is as clear evidence as any that the former president presents a threat to democracy.

You can disagree that Trump is the threat his critics say he is. But you cannot deny the evidence. Unlike Trump’s false election claims, the threat Trump poses to democracy is not an invention; it is a belief based on his own actions, documented widely, and it’s entirely fair game for Democrats to focus on.