A New York Times reporter called former President Trump an “instigator” and “inspiration” of political violence two days after he survived a second failed assassination attempt.
“Donald Trump has long been seen as an instigator of political violence,” chief White House correspondent Peter Baker says in a video posted by The Times on Tuesday. “Of course, even as Trump is blaming Democrats for their rhetoric, he isn’t giving any second thoughts to his own.”
Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ “rhetoric” calling him a “threat to Democracy” was to blame for the latest attempt on his life.
Suspect Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested after he was spotted reportedly pointing a rifle through a chain-link fence near where Trump was playing golf at Trump International Golf Club on Sunday.
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In July, Trump narrowly survived another assassination attempt after he was shot at while hosting a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Baker critiqued Trump for blaming Democrats’ inflammatory rhetoric, arguing that Trump had long “trafficked in the language of violence.”
“At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed,” Baker wrote in an accompanying article for The Times.
“Even as he complained that the Democrats had made him a target by calling him a threat to democracy, he repeated his own assertion that ‘these are people that want to destroy our country’ and called them ‘the enemy from within’ — certainly language no less provocative than that used about him,” Baker said of Trump’s attacks on Harris and Biden.
The reporter suggested Trump had not changed his ways after the first assassination attempt shocked the country.
“We would have thought that after a former president was actually hit by a bullet, grazed by a bullet in July, that there would have been more of a sustained reaction, maybe a soul-searching about where our politics is. But in fact, the campaign and the politics of this country pretty much went back to where they were pretty quickly,” he says in the video post.
“I think what it says is that political violence may not be accepted, but it may increasingly become expected,” he concluded.
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On the New York Times “The Daily” podcast, Baker and podcast host Michael Barbaro doubled down on these comments about Trump encouraging violence.
“In some sense, Trump is the through line in this new era of political violence,” Barbaro said.
“This idea that Trump has at times inspired political violence through his rhetoric. We know that,” he continued.
“Yeah exactly,” Baker replied. “I think Trump has elevated the temperature in our society to the point where, therefore, politics is an existential fight, and it’s not just enough to have a debate…”
The suspect in the thwarted shooting, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, had previously echoed Biden and Harris’ anti-Trump comments that “Democracy is on the ballot” on his social media pages this year and that Democrats “cannot lose.”
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The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
