This week the MAGA Disinformation Industrial Complex is spewing blame on "the left" for the apparent second assassination attempt on Trump. On Sunday, a disturbed man who had racked up dozens of weapons violations but remained armed and free thanks to decades of MAGA-pandering, loose gun laws poked his machine gun through the fence around Trump’s Palm Beach golf course.
Agents nabbed him before he fired a shot, but the incident was another dot on the graph of rising American political violence this year, following the deadly Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt which left shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks and a rallygoer dead — and Trump with a bloodied ear.
Trump immediately went on Fox to accuse his political opponents — as he and his supporters did after Butler. The man with the gun in Palm Beach “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said the day after his security team apprehended Ryan Wesley Routh. “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.”
Apparently, the idea is that Democrats should suspend their campaign against Trump/Vance in the wake of the latest — let’s call it a gun incident since Routh thankfully never got around to firing a shot from his AK-47.
J.D. Vance picked up the refrain, proclaiming at a speech in Atlanta 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. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out.”
Trump superfan Elon Musk gave his stamp of approval to this horrendous idea (translation: why aren’t people shooting at Kamala Harris???). He posted a perplexed face emoji under an X post repeating that no one has tried to kill Harris or Walz. The Richest Man in the World (tm) had second thoughts - as he often does - and deleted that implicitly threatening post, but not before harvesting tens of thousands of “likes.”
All the gaslighting this week about Democratic rhetoric obscures the fact that Trump himself raised America to this new level of violence from the day in 2015 when he sent his retired NYPD goon Keith Schiller out on 5th Avenue to rough up people protesting his “Mexican rapists” campaign slogan.
Besides vulgarity and shamelessness, the hallmark of the nine and counting MAGA years in American politics is the rising number of violent threats directed at elected officials across the country. This “tidal wave of menacing behavior,” as CNN put it, includes the skyrocketing number of prosecuted threats during Trump’s term in office, peaking in 2021 — with more than 40 percent of cases occurring in the final weeks of Trump's term. Threats are now rising again.
Trump has always urged his rally-goers to beat protestors. He now promises to embark on a “bloody” deportation project while suggesting his supporters will engage in violence if he loses the election. His rhetoric is effective. Even before his last violent insurrection on January 6, in May 2020, NBC found 54 cases in which the charged perpetrators of threats and assaults referenced Trump’s incitement to violence. “Reviewing police reports and court records, ABC News found that in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed Trump amid the immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant's violent or threatening behavior.”
No one in the MAGAsphere seems to notice or care that their own resistance to reasonable gun control enabled misfit Routh - who has dozens of previous charges - to arm himself in the first place. Routh had been pulled over by police more than 100 times and was considered “a dangerous person,” but still legally stocked high-powered weapons and explosives. In a sane nation, a man convicted on a weapons of mass destruction charge - as Routh was after barricading himself inside his North Carolina roofing business with a machine gun after being pulled over at a traffic stop - would not walk free, let alone get to keep and expand his gun collection.
But Routh was sent home and remained armed.
The barricading incident was just one of the violent confrontations Routh racked up. He has convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, for possession of stolen property, for hit-and-run, misdemeanor convictions for resisting an officer and driving on a suspended license. Routh doesn’t seem to have spent much, if any time in jail. For all the convictions, he received a suspended sentence and parole or probation.
What was such a man doing free, locked, and loaded?
Committing a crime as a white man in Dixie is one answer. But there’s a broader political reason: In much of MAGA America, impunity for bullies and wackos includes the right to stockpile guns and ammo and carry concealed weapons.
For years, the Republican Party has been a shameless subsidiary and propaganda machine for the NRA and the gun industry. The creed is: Let no man’s guns be messed with. Gun worship is a plank of the Republican agenda, and that fact is rule number one in the GOP-controlled House. These are the politicians who invented the family Christmas card with ma, pa, and the kids all holding AR-15s in front of the tree.
Here’s a brief history of their moves, starting with the Sandy Hook school massacre, that hideous event that in hindsight, marked the end of any hope for a disarmed future.
In 2012, in the weeks after a severely troubled boy killed his mother, 20 children, and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, a majority of U.S. senators supported passing legislation requiring expanded background checks for gun purchases. But a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate killed that effort.
(That failure of political will was a moment of utter despair for any American still paying attention. If Republicans in Congress won’t do anything after the murder of a classroom of babies, they never will.)
Ten years and thousands of American gun deaths later, in 2022, a Democrat-led Congress eked out a bill that made incremental progress. It expanded the records used for background checks on gun purchasers under age 21, increased punishments for straw purchases, and closed the so-called boyfriend loophole, expanding the gun ban to people convicted of domestic violence against a dating partner as well as a spouse. But the final Senate-approved bill lacked any of the gun control provisions Democrats had included in the House-passed bills, including expanding background checks and banning assault weapons and bump stocks.
In the first week of the current Congress, in February 2023, Republicans sported cute little silver AR-15 pins on their lapels. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), a fierce opponent of federal regulations on firearms, who owns two gun shops, had handed them out. “They say the pins are symbols of their commitment to the Second Amendment and Americans’ right to bear arms,” reported a Time writer who canvassed the members.
Not that they likely cared, but Rep. Clyde, according to later reporting in the New York Times, didn’t tell his colleagues that his own gun business had fallen afoul of existing federal laws aimed at dealers of guns later used in crimes. One of his two gun stores, Clyde Armory in Athens, sold more than 25 guns later used in crimes, according to the Times.
The ATF had placed Rep. Clyde’s business into a federal monitoring program in 2020 and 2021.
Last year, after a weekend in which the nation racked up the highest death toll from mass shootings, Senate Republicans blocked a national assault weapons ban. Republican Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso objected to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request for unanimous consent to pass the assault weapons ban, despite the pleas of Democratic senators who took to the Senate floor to recite American gun violence statistics. Republicans also torpedoed another Democrat-led proposal for universal background checks.
“Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm,” Barrasso said. “Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty.”
Barrasso added that Democrats want to ban many semi-automatic firearms “because of the way they look.” (They look pretty bad to Secret Service agents who spot them poking through a fence on a Florida golf course, but OK.)
MAGA tools like Barasso on Capitol Hill are wildly out of step with the rest of America. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 92 percent of Americans favor requiring background checks for all firearm sales.
In pro-gun states, the insanity and hypocrisy defies belief. In Texas, for example, lawmakers loosen gun laws in response to massacres. The legislators passed permitless carry less than two years after 30 people died in mass shootings in just two incidents, in El Paso and Odessa. After 19 children died in Uvalde, neither Texas nor its Congressional delegation did anything besides transmitting thoughts and prayers. “It’s astounding to me,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat from San Antonio whose district includes Uvalde, told the Texas Tribune at the time. “We’re supposed to create things. We’re supposed to create legislation to keep people safe. By God, to keep children safe. And here we’ve done exactly the opposite.”
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible. This post is reprinted with permission from her American Freakshow Substack. Please consider subscribing.
