Pretty strong evidence
Hmm. What’s the chain of reasoning here?
[Trump] accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of inviting assassins to target him when they warn that he is a threat to democracy.
He told Fox News Digital on Monday without evidence that the alleged would-be shooter “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.” Trump went on: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
…
Trump’s running mate advanced an even blunter argument.
“The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance said. “I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”
Is it though? Two examples out of millions of Dem voters isn’t really strong evidence that anything. If two people out of millions get a headache after eating a banana, medical researchers aren’t going to get all excited about a new avenue of investigation. Two out of millions of anything is just…not not random.
Would I be making similar inferences if two people had tried to shoot Biden or Harris? Probably. I’d be wrong.
But if Democrats are to blame for sometimes going over the top, Trump has made a political brand out of the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by a president or ex-president in the modern history of the United States. The scale and intensity of his invective dwarf anything that the Democrats have flung at him. He calls Harris a “fascist” in almost every public appearance — for instance, he said on August 26 in Virginia that “we have a fascist person running who’s incompetent.” He used similar rhetoric on August 23, August 17, and August 3 in campaign appearances.
Oh he’s just joking.
Chain of reasoning? I don’t know about chain but this is a pretty solid bit of reasoning. For Trump. If people are trying to kill him his enemies must be behind it, inciting them. It doesn’t occur to him that he’s capable of doing that all by himself. Which is surprising given how he’s the greatest at everything. Sarcasm aside, he can put two and two together and arrive at something approximating five but his almost complete lack of any sort of theory of mind pretty much rules out anything more complex than crude cause and effect.
Isn’t this the same guy that said that “Second Amendment People” could stop Hillary Clinton?
Biden has far better resources available to him than some rattled Florida gun but and Mr. Stochastic Terrorism himself has been doing the same in spades for years. He should stop whining; it’s unmanly.
Note that both shooters were apparently once Trump supporters. This isn’t Biden or Harris siccing the dogs on him, this is the predictable reaction to people figuring out (finally) that they were conned.
Calling the Pennsylvania shooter a “supporter” is a bit of a stretch; just your standard mass shooter profile (who wanted a flashier suicide than is the norm).
Or wanted his name in the papers.
Amounts to much the same thing; I’ve heard the suggestion from a few commentators (I think on Political Gabfest) that the reason we don’t have high profile serial killers anymore is that a mass shooting is easier and fulfills a similar cultural niche. Hard to test that conjecture but it’s not implausible.