Republican politicians, Donald Trump included, have been lowering down their tone and tempering their rhetoric to prevent violent escalation within the United States. Trump even spoke of having a speech ready but then throwing it out because it was too “tough” and that he wanted to work to better unite the country. All of this proves just how politically volatile things can get and have been getting in this country. It also shows that some of Trump’s followers are willing to be violent, and that Trump knows this. As we read in the New York Times:
Since a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through a part of his ear at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump has been signing his emails and texts to supporters with two words: “Unity. Peace.” Republican leaders have tried to project a similarly toned-down approach, lowering the temperature and minimizing the savaging of Democrats. In an interview with CBS News on Tuesday morning, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, proclaimed, “This is going to be different.”
The result throughout the first day, however, was mixed, as evidenced by Mr. Johnson’s speech. Republican leaders and top surrogates were working through exactly how, and to what degree, they should project that unity and peace. And for a party animated for the past eight years by grievance and Mr. Trump’s dark promises of retribution and warnings about the existential threat posed by the “radical left,” efforts to turn down the temperature of their political rhetoric were halting. Messages about focusing on policy and Republican plans for the future were mixed with caustic rhetoric lambasting Democrats and criticizing the polices of President Biden.
Mr. Trump, in an interview with The New York Post on Sunday, suggested that his near-death experience over the weekend had prompted him to alter his tone, saying he wanted to “try to unite our country,” and that he had “prepared an extremely tough speech” about Mr. Biden but had thrown it out.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman and former presidential candidate known for his aggressive hyperbole, urged Republicans to accept those whose beliefs differ from their own.
“Our enemy is not the Democrats,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on Monday morning at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the nerve center for conservative policies. “Our enemy is an ideology, and our task ahead is how do we defeat that poisonous ideology while still viewing our fellow citizens as our citizens.”
In a brief speech on Monday night, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the candidate for governor known for his vitriolic language (last month, he said that “some folks need killing”) made not a single criticism of Democrats, instead simply praising the strength of the Republican platform.
On Tuesday, when the scheduled theme is immigration, Republicans may find themselves back on the attack.
Its good that numerous Republicans are working to deescalate things. With Trump getting shot, a lot of people on edge, and talk of civil war in this country is at the highest it has been in a long time. But (and we are afraid to say it) it appears that eventually there will be pockets of violence in this country and it will be of a political nature. Political volatility is a phenomena that has become widespread in the world, from France where people have spoken about using guillotines to kill politicians, to Israel where talk of civil war over the planned political judicial overhaul has been going on within recent years, to the United States where a former president has just been shot. Political chaos and volatility will become a thing we shall grow accustomed to.