As I pointed out yesterday, the media has not been shy about connecting bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio to Donald Trump and JD Vance. Every major outlet ran a version of this story connecting the threats to Trump's rhetoric even though no one really knew who was making the threats. 

Then Monday we learned that most of those threats were being emailed from overseas, apparently from one country in particular though no one would say which one. Gov. DeWine did say this appeared to be part of a foreign attempt to "mess with the United States." In other words, there may be an ulterior motive for these threats that goes beyond just crazy people responding to Donald Trump's rhetoric.

But this type of reasoning, which goes from rhetoric to threats without making any specific connection in between, creates a challenge for the media. They've decided it's perfectly fine to say that Trump's words incited threats, but as we all know President Trump himself has been the target of at least two actual assassination attempts. So the same sort of reasoning would seem to apply in his case. If Democrats are saying harsh things about Trump and Trump is a target for violence, doesn't it follow that those two things are connected?

No. Not according to the left-leaning media.

By some partisan alchemy that has yet to be explained by anyone, harsh rhetoric on the left does not generate a climate of hate. To even suggest such a thing is ridiculous and highly suspect. And so you get the national media doing the "seizing" thing, where they turn an actual story that is bad for Democrats into a political story about Republicans trying to capitalize politically. 

David wrote about some of this earlier today and this one example from CNN is just so on the nose.

Wolf Blitzer: "The Trump campaign is seizing on this apparent assassination attempt as a way to rile up his base."

Or, ya know, we're a little angry that people keep trying to MURDER President Trump. pic.twitter.com/Xv540CXgqT

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 16, 2024

But Wolf Blitzer is not alone. Early this morning the NY Times published an entire story dedicated to making this same case. The word "seize" does not occur in this story but I think it must have been a real effort to keep it out because that's exactly what the author is saying.

Three days later, after facing his second assassination attempt in two months, Mr. Trump raised what has become an all-too-common American problem: incendiary political speech. But not his — that of his rivals.

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News Digital...

Now, as part of a continued effort to deny Democrats one of their chief lines of attack against him, Mr. Trump is seeking to blame his opponents for an increasingly volatile political climate that he himself has helped stoke.

Trump is saying about the left exactly what the media is saying about the right. Is that unfair or unreasonable? The tone of the article suggests it is but there's no real line of reasoning behind it.

After doing her best to suggest Trump is seizing on this argument, the author does allow that there is a "climate of violence" (a variation on the climate of hate) which impacts everyone.

“They talk about democracy. I’m a ‘threat to democracy.’ They’re the threat to democracy,” [Trump] said.

Such harsh attacks paired with an election waged on stakes that both sides say are urgent has helped foment a pervasive political climate of violence.

Isn't it odd how the awareness of this climate of violence only arises the moment Trump repeats what Democrats have said about him? If they hadn't heard these words in his voice, would the media have noticed at all? I honestly don't think so. 

I think there's a reason for that. Most journalists identify with the Democratic party even if they don't admit it for professional reasons. Internally, they just don't see the threat ever coming from "their" side. The threat is always coming from the "other" side. So when the two sides are saying the same exact words back at each other, one side sounds reasonable and the other sounds like a threat. I don't think most journalists are self-aware enough to realize this is what is happening.

Eventually the author does get around to connecting Trump to the threats in Springfield. and two paragraphs later presents Vance making the same argument toward Democrats as a way to "deflect" responsibility for his own rhetoric.

On the stage, a visibly angry Mr. Trump promoted a false claim, also amplified by his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets. The accusations have put the town and the Haitian community there on edge, with local Republican officials struggling to calm fears amid a series of bomb threats...

On Monday, Mr. Vance used the assassination attempt to deflect from Democratic denunciations over his own role in stoking fear in Springfield, calling on Democrats to tone down their rhetoric toward Mr. Trump and Republicans, while also ratcheting up his accusations that they bore responsibility for the two assassination attempts.

I have the feeling Democrats would really like to call this whataboutism except it's not a different issue. It's the same issue just in the opposite direction. Isn't it possible that Democrats are the ones using the the Springfield, Ohio story to deflect from their own rhetoric and its role in stoking political violence? It never seems to occur to the author that there might be a different way to look at this, one in which the Democrats are not the good guys.