President Donald Trump was the seeming victim of an assassination attempt on Saturday — and one ex-presidential adviser, who served Trump’s Republican predecessor, says the president himself bears partial responsibility for what happened.
“This isn’t normal,” wrote Steve Schmidt, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, on Sunday. “It isn’t random. And no matter how loudly the MAGA movement insists, it isn’t the fault of Donald Trump’s critics. The argument that criticism of Donald Trump somehow incites violence against him isn’t just wrong. It’s an inversion of reality so brazen that it demands to be confronted directly.”
Schmidt then added, “Because over the last decade, no figure in American life has done more to normalize violent rhetoric than Donald Trump.”
After clarifying that the only person directly responsible for the attempt is the would-be shooter, Schmidt explained that Trump has intentionally sowed violence into American political life with his rhetoric. For this reason, Schmidt concluded, it is hardly a coincidence that he has been targeted so many times for violence himself.
“Donald Trump has spent 12 years saturating the American bloodstream with violent imagery, threats, and suggestions that are sometimes explicit and sometimes coy, but they are always deliberate,” Schmidt wrote. “This is the same man who, during the 2016 campaign, mused that ‘the Second Amendment people’ might be able to ‘do something’ about his opponent. During a 2020 presidential debate, Trump told the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by.’ This is the same man who has repeatedly invoked apocalyptic language, warning of a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses power.”
Schmidt concluded, “This isn’t stray rhetoric. It’s a pattern of suggestion and menace. It’s a pattern of telling supporters that violence is both inevitable and, at times, justified. And here is the essential point that must not be lost: Donald Trump doesn’t speak like other politicians. He speaks in a language of implication. He constructs a world in which enemies are not just wrong, but existential threats. He frames elections not as contests, but as battles for survival. He always hints that there are people who can act where he can’t.”
As such, Schmidt described it as a “grotesque inversion” for Trump supporters to claim the president’s critics, rather than the president himself, created the environment in which the would-be shooting could happen.
“Donald Trump didn’t cause that man to pick up a weapon, but Donald Trump has spent years making violence feel like part of the political conversation,” Schmidt argued. “He has lowered the temperature threshold at which rage becomes action. He has blurred the line between metaphor and instruction. And he has done it more consistently, more visibly, and more successfully than any political figure of this era.”
For these reasons, and because free speech is so vital to a democratic society, Schmidt concluded that “a country can’t survive when its most powerful political figure floods the public square with violent language, and then demands immunity from scrutiny when violence follows. A country cannot remain free when criticism is recast as incitement, and incitement is excused as politics.”
Schmidt is not alone among experts to place the blame for anti-Trump violence partially at the president’s own feet. Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies," told this journalist for Salon in 2024 that there is a "kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn't connect to reality." He added that it’s “shocking” that “the person that has promoted violence through rhetoric, and even sometimes the glorification of that violence, the idea that that person can complain about the 'rhetorical violence' of his enemies.”
Finchelstein also compared Trump to history’s most infamous fascist leader, arguing he "does this kind of thing again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler." Based on his analysis, this means that Trump "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist and political scientist who authored "The Missing Middle," also told Salon that "there are resemblances [to Hitler], especially when demonization happens. Or calling groups enemies or unclean."
At the time of the article, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Salon that "it's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."