I was with President Trump last Friday in Florida, just one night before a deranged lunatic attempted to assassinate him and Republican officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
It is surreal to look back on this weekend and see how much can change in just a few hours. But the truth is, this did not happen randomly. This was a planned attack, with the manifesto to prove it. Despite what the media is saying, this man had one motive: to kill the president of the United States and anyone who stood in his way.
For more than a decade, Democrats have carelessly used rhetoric to attack and demonize President Trump and Republicans to the point where some individuals now see violence as a justified response. They are willing to risk their own lives and freedom to do the unthinkable and attempt to murder a sitting president. If this is what they are willing to do to a democratically elected president and his supporters when they are out of power, imagine what they would do if they gained power.
At the end of the day, this lies at Democrats’ feet. They fuel hatred and reckless behavior with their rhetoric; then suddenly pretend they want to “turn the temperature down” only after tragedy strikes. It is absurd, and it must be called out.
Just last week, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called for “maximum warfare” against President Trump and Republicans and doubled down this week. And that is far from the most extreme example of violent rhetoric from the Left. The RNC Rapid Response team was able to quickly assemble a list of at least 51 instances in which Democrats’ rhetoric encouraged or excused violence against Republicans. These examples are not rare, and over the past decade Democrats have become more and more forward about their true intentions.
Plenty of Democrats have made half-hearted attempts to walk back past comments by issuing tone-deaf statements that ignore their party’s role in escalating tensions, shifting the blame, and with some not even mentioning the President. Others have refused to comment altogether.
Specifically, Democrats Roy Cooper, Jon Ossoff, Sherrod Brown, the Democratic National Committee, and its Chairman Ken Martin have yet to comment on this horrific act of violence. Their silence is not just cowardly, it is disgraceful, unpatriotic, and invites future violence.
Democrats did not take accountability after President Trump’s first assassination attempt in Butler. They did not lower the temperature after the second attempt in Palm Beach. They did not change their language after Charlie Kirk was murdered in broad daylight. And they continue to gaslight the American people by insisting their tactics are not the problem.
Democrats routinely traffic in reckless, inflammatory rhetoric against President Trump and Republicans, but when that rhetoric escalates into real-world violence, they go silent out of fear of their own extremist base. If a Democrat candidate or elected official cannot immediately and unequivocally condemn the gunman, they are complicit. Full stop.
And if that were not enough, for nearly 80 days Democrats have refused to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, even as agents put their lives on the line every day to protect the President and the American people.
This is simply the latest example in a long pattern of Democrats putting their own political interests above the safety and well-being of Americans, and I suspect it will not be the last.
Every American deserves to know why DHS is not fully funded, why the President of the United States has faced three assassination attempts in the past two years, why Democrats remain silent, and why they continue to encourage violence with no remorse.
Democrats have once again proven themselves to be the party that puts the safety of Americans last. That should be on everyone’s mind as they think about the future of this country, where we are heading, and what choices we make as we head to the ballot box in November.
Joe Gruters is the chairman of the Republican National Committee.
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