Episode No. 148: The Trump Shooting

I contend that former President Trump, because of his rhetoric, is to blame for creating the atmosphere that allowed that horror to happen. I also blame his rhetoric for the culture of violence in America. I cite chapter and verse from his statements since mid-2015 to support this. Someone for whom I have great respect said I was an idiot for thinking this way. This episode gives you the chance to decide whether I am an idiot. I can't wait to read your e-mails.

Transcript

Episode No. 148: The Trump Shooting

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the podcast in which we explore contemporary issues through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

As I mentioned in the last two podcasts, I’m releasing new episodes during the summer only when something in the news cries out for exploration—and the news just doesn’t stop crying out. This week, it’s the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

It only took minutes from the moment Trump dropped to the floor behind the podium Saturday for the conspiracy theorists to come rushing forward with their claims, almost all of which were totally off the wall. After Shabbat, I sent out my take. While I didn’t support these conspiracy claims in that e-mail, I did say that Trump “has to bear much of the responsibility for the atmosphere of political violence that infects our country.” 

Someone for whom I have great respect responded to that by saying, “He who blames the victim in any way comes off as an idiot!”

In my e-mail, I also said that I would include “chapter-and-verse evidence of his culpability” in this podcast, which I am about to do.

And so, the topic for this week is how Donald Trump and his allies helped to create the atmosphere of violence in America that led to his being shot last Saturday. While there are some on the far left who have contributed to this atmosphere, this episode is not about political violence alone. I also hold Trump and his crowd responsible for the culture of violence they have created that has led to the frightening number of gun violence incidents that seem to set new records year after year. I’ll get to this aspect later in this episode.

By the end of the episode, which probably will run a little over a half-hour, I’d like to hear from you on whether you also consider me an idiot.

Before I begin, let me be clear about this. I am not subscribing to the truly idiotic conspiracy theories flowing in from left and right. On the one hand, many in the anti-Trump camp accused him and his campaign of staging the shooting. On the other, many in the pro-Trump camp—including several members of Congress—have accused President Biden of having ordered the hit on Trump.

The anti-Trump conspiracy theorists said that the shooting was a set-up that was either meant to give the former president a heroic image on the eve of this week’s Republican convention, or it was meant to bolster his chances of being elected president in November, or both. It did both, by the way, although not by any conspiratorial design.

Many in the pro-Trump world, meanwhile, saw the hand of the Antifa movement in the shooting. Antifa, of course, is short for “anti-fascist,” and it’s a very loosely organized political movement that opposes all forms of extreme right-wing, fascist ideology. Alex Jones, for his part, blamed “the deep state,” which the extreme right-wing believes includes prominent Jews, most notably George Soros and the Rothschild family.

The QAnon conspiracy crowd, meanwhile, blamed several high-profile Democrats and Republicans, and some even suggested that the CIA may have been a part of that conspiracy.

Then there were the Republican lawmakers who insisted that President Biden called the shots—and I mean that literally. They say he ordered a hit on Trump during a private phone call he had with donors just days before the shooting. They make that claim by taking an unfortunate comment by Biden way out of context.

Biden told the donors that Trump was running from his record and that Democrats couldn’t let Trump “go another day without explaining what he’s doing.”

Said Biden, referring to his poor debate performance on June 27th, “We’re done talking about the (June 27) debate. It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye. He’s gotten away with doing nothing for the last 10 days except ride around in his golf cart, bragging about scores he didn’t score…The fact is, he’s not answering questions.”

That “put Trump in the bullseye” comment was unfortunate because it’s exactly the kind of expression Trump would use, and Biden should have avoided. What Biden meant was that it was time to force Trump into answering questions. That’s clear from the context, yet Republicans were quick to rip it from its context and pounce on that comment after Trump was shot.

Said Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, “Joe Biden sent the orders.”

Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn said Biden’s bullseye comment was responsible for the “assassination attempt against President Trump.”

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert said she believed that Biden is responsible, because “the sitting President of the United States called for him to be put in a bullseye.”

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “The left wants a civil war. They have been trying to start one for years. These people are sick and evil.”

When it comes to people who are sick and evil, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene needs only to look in the mirror. As for who wants to start a civil war, she just needs to look at her supporters on the far right.

Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, the House majority leader who himself was shot in 2017, tried to scale back some of the “Biden did it” comments by shifting the blame to the Democrats as a whole because they have fueled what he called, and these are his words, “ludicrous hysteria” about Trump being re-elected. Said he: “Clearly, we’ve seen far-left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

I could not agree more with that last comment, but Scalise was aiming at the wrong target. For one thing, we’ve seen more far-right lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past than people on the far left. Scalise needs to direct his “incendiary rhetoric” plea to the incendiary rhetorician in chief—Donald J. Trump—and at his fellow Republicans and their nutjob allies on the far right. Trump began empowering those nutjobs when he first announced his candidacy in mid-2015 and has continued to empower them with almost every speech he gives and every comment he makes.

The record is clear and incontrovertible that the incendiary rhetoric Scalise says must stop is the incendiary rhetoric that spews forth from Trump’s unfiltered mouth, so let’s look at the record of his speeches, tweets, and public statements and see whether I’m an idiot for saying that they have emboldened violent behavior among his supporters.

Keep in mind, as we explore his record, that this is the man who in January 2016 said at a campaign rally in Iowa and has often repeated ever since, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling on July 1st, there may be some truth to that if Trump is re-elected.

In 2016, Trump’s presidential campaign was frequently marked by statements that appeared to condone or even encourage violence. Here are some examples:

During a rally in Cedar Rapids on February 1st, 2016, the day the Iowa caucuses were being held, Trump was wildly cheered when he said, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”

That same month, Trump railed at how security guards at a Las Vegas rally were being too gentle with a protester. Said Trump, “He’s walking out with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” Then, at a rally in Warren, Michigan, he demanded that security guards remove a protester. Said he, “Get him out.” He also said that if they managed to hurt that protester, “I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it.”

The following month, three protesters were roughed up by Trump supporters at a Louisville, Kentucky, rally. They sued Trump in federal court for inciting that violence. The judge hearing that case agreed that there was sufficient evidence that the protesters’ injuries were a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s comments, but the case was eventually thrown out by a federal appeals court because, the judges said, Trump’s remarks were protected speech under the First Amendment.

One of the most significant instances of Trump’s rhetoric being linked to violence was after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The rally was organized by virulently anti-Semitic and anti-democracy white supremacists and other far-right groups, and it turned deadly when a car plowed into counter-protesters, killing one of them, 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Trump’s first response was to say that there were “very fine people on both sides.” By equating the actions of white supremacists with those of the counter-protesters, Trump was seen as tacitly endorsing the far-right groups’ actions and beliefs.

The immediate criticism was so great that Trump was forced into delivering a speech in which he attacked race hatred and anti-Semitism. That sent his far-right nutjob supporters into a frenzy, which then caused Trump to tell White House staffers, among others, that the speech was “the biggest [expletive] mistake I’ve made.”

In May 2020, in response to protests after the death of George Floyd, Trump threatened military intervention in Minnesota. Trump tweeted that these protesters were all thugs—with thugs in all caps and warned that “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” a phrase that traces back to the brutality police used against Black Americans in the 1960s. Twitter posted a warning label on that tweet—and on an official White House tweet with identical language. Twitter claimed that the postings violated its rules about “glorifying violence.”

We also have the testimony of Trump’s secretary of defense at the time, Mike Esper. He insists that Trump was serious during the George Floyd demonstrations taking place around the White House when he asked Esper to have the army “shoot [the protestors] in the legs or something.”

As those demonstrations continued into June, Trump threatened to call out the military. “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

Trump also has been known to advocate shooting the legs out from under migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. According to a book written by New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, Trump raised this possibility at least twice—in November 2018 and again in March 2019. Trump denied many of the book’s assertions, but he never denied this one.

Beginning in April 2020, as COVID-19 spread around the country and protestors took to the streets in various states because of the stay-at-home orders being issued, Trump sided with the protestors. In one tweet, he called on protesters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia to liberate their states—with the word liberate in all caps followed by an exclamation point. He added that they needed to “save your great Second Amendment. It is under siege!”

For the record, law enforcement agencies, intelligence organizations, and security analysts who monitor extremist rhetoric identify the word liberate as a codeword for promoting violent actions.

What the right to bear arms had to do with those COVID-related stay-at-home orders escapes me, but some people saw it as suggesting taking up arms if necessary to challenge those orders. Armed protesters, in fact, attacked the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan, later that month. Trump defended them. He tweeted, “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”

Trump also believes that police have to be more violent when dealing with people accused of crimes. As he told law enforcement officers in a July 2017 speech on Long Island, “I have to tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal. Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.”

That had to stop, Trump said. Police were handcuffed and those handcuffs had to come off. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon…, please don’t be too nice….When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know…, You can take the hand away, okay?”

In September 2020, Trump backed up his comments when he praised the U.S. Marshals who killed a self-described Antifa member who was suspected of killing a right-wing activist a month earlier. Trump actually took credit for the shooting, the righteousness of which remains a matter of debate.. Said Trump: “We sent in the U.S. Marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over.”  He added, “That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

Trump often calls the news media the “enemy of the people.” While campaigning for then Rep. Greg Gianforte, a Montana Republican who was running for re-election during the 2018 midterms, Trump praised Gianforte for having body-slammed a reporter in May 2017. Said Trump to loud cheers, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”

The reporter in question, Ben Jacobs, who was working at the time for the British newspaper The Guardian, had asked Gianforte a question about a healthcare issue. As Jacobs later recounted it on ABC’s Good Morning America, Gianforte “seemed to just snap. He grabbed my recorder, and next thing I knew, I’d gone from being vertical to horizontal on the floor.” 

Gianforte, who now is Montana’s governor, subsequently was arrested for the assault. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault charges, was fined $385, and sentenced to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger management training. He also reportedly apologized and donated $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Yet Trump said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”

That, though, doesn’t compare to his reaction just two weeks before the 2018 midterms, when someone mailed at least 16 pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and media outlets, including former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, the actor Robert De Niro and at least one CNN office. Trump at first said that such acts “of political violence…have no place in the United States of America.”

But in less than 24 hours, he tweeted a different tune: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!” he tweeted. The word fast was in all caps followed by an exclamation point.

That’s just another way of saying, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!” It was also a way of putting a bullseye on the media.

Who can forget that moment in September 2020 during that election’s first presidential debate, when Chris Wallace asked Trump: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland?”

Wallace was referring to the civil unrest and protests that occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, during the summer of 2020. In Kenosha, violent clashes broke out following the police shooting of a Black man. Portland, meanwhile, was marked by a seemingly endless series of nightly demonstrations, sometimes violent ones, following the death of George Floyd. In both cases, white supremacist extremists sought to foment the violence.

Said Trump, “Sure, I'm willing to do that, but I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.”

Biden then interjected by mentioning the Proud Boys as an example of the far-right extremists Wallace was asking about. Said Trump in response: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” The group’s members took that to be a call to arms, and they even used the phrase on social media, as a way of saying that they were ready to act on Trump’s orders. Trump, with a straight face, later insisted that he had never heard of the Proud Boys, a fatuous comment given that throughout 2020, the Proud Boys were regularly in the news due to their involvement in protests, their confrontations with counter-protesters, and their political activism, often associated with supporting Trump and opposing left-wing groups.

Of course, the most infamous instance of Trump’s rhetoric leading to violence occurred on January 6th, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. In a speech earlier that day, Trump urged his followers to “fight like hell,” adding, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”

He also said, “If you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore….We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”

Then he said, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue...and we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give our Republicans...the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Trump used social media to promote what happened on January 6th. On December 19, 2020, for example, he sought to mobilize his supporters to prepare for January 6th. Said he in a tweet that day, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

The Proud Boys, I should note, were among the groups Trump emboldened on January 6th. They were seen brazenly rampaging through the Capitol with tee-shirts emblazoned with 6MNE on the front—6MNE, which stands for Six Million was Not Enough.

Ah yes. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

Finally, speaking just over a year ago at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner in the Detroit suburb of Novi, Trump made clear what his plans are immediately upon being elected: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists [a right-wing code-word, by the way, for such Jews as George Soros and the Rothschilds]. We will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, [also often right-wing code-words for Jews] and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will defeat crooked Joe Biden. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

As I said earlier, liberate is considered by law enforcement agencies, intelligence organizations, and security analysts a potential codeword for violent action.

Since then, Trump has repeated that message numerous times, often in the exact same words, and also often adding that the 2024 election will be “our final battle.”

I could go on, but I think I made my point about Trump’s violence-infused rhetoric and how it’s responsible in part for what happened on Saturday, and how it’s responsible for the toxic political atmosphere in our country today.

As I said, though, I’m also blaming Trump, the Republicans, and their freakishly far-right allies, as well, for the actions they’ve taken over the years that I believe make them all directly responsible not only for that shooting but also for the epidemic of gun violence going back for at least the last 10 years, from 2014 through 2023.

That’s because their actions stand in the way of effective gun control legislation being passed and for the tossing out by the federal judges they’ve put on the bench of many of the laws that do get passed, including by justices they’ve put on the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump and the GOP are at least indirectly responsible for the 5,214 mass shootings and for the 60 mass murders committed in the United States between 2014 and 2023. I hold them especially responsible for the 11,940 gun deaths of children and teenagers through age 17 during those years.

I say they’re indirectly responsible because they helped put the guns into the hands of the people who did the actual shooting.

The GOP is especially protective of automatic assault weapons that can shoot 800 rounds a minute, like Bushmaster’s AR-15 and its ACR. Remington also sells an ACR. Given that the letters ACR stand for Adaptive Combat Rifle, the idea that such weapons should be allowed to be sold to the general public is beyond reason to understand. The excuse they give is that these clearly identified combat weapons are protected by the Second Amendment because they’re not combat weapons at all. As one Bushmaster ad said of its ACR, it is “The most reliable and adaptable modern sporting rifle ever built.”

Seriously? We need a weapon that shoots 800 rounds a minute to bring down a quail?

The author Stephen King on Saturday night posted what he considered an irony. “An AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle was used in the Butler shooting. These are the guns the Republican party—and Trump—want to protect.”

AR, by the way, doesn’t stand for Assault Rifle, as so many of us believe. It stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” and it was so named after the company that first developed it in the 1950s.

While I’m at it, I think it’s laughable that Trump, the GOP, and their allies call themselves pro-life, yet they want to ban abortions of every kind throughout the United States, as some individual states have now done, even though the evidence shows that the already totally unacceptable number of maternal deaths here in the United States each year could rise by as much as 24 percent if that should ever happen. Based on the 817 maternal deaths in 2022, for example, this would add 196 more maternal deaths. So much for being pro-life. This, however, is for a whole different discussion.

There should be no question that incendiary rhetoric on the part of public figures incites violence. Study after study has shown that to be true.

Law-enforcement and linguistic researchers use a framework known as the Verbal-Textual Hostility framework, or VTH. It identifies and categorizes forms of hostile speech, thereby assisting in the development of risk-assessment instruments for use by front-line officers in evaluating hate crimes. The VTH was applied to Trump’s campaign speeches to explore the impact of his language on promoting white nationalism and hate crimes. Trump scored high on the VTH’s measurements. 

The VTH framework identifies several categories of hostile speech, all of which Trump is known for, including:

Labeling groups or individuals as criminal; advocating for control or power over others; suggesting that certain groups don’t belong in the country; publicly expressing contempt for others or insulting them outright; and belittling or undervaluing individuals or groups.

These categories contribute to what is often referred to as a “trifecta of violence,” in which hateful rhetoric, state-sanctioned discrimination, and increases in hate crimes and bias-motivated violence are interconnected.

That brings me to what Jewish law and tradition have to say about this subject. Beginning with the Torah and running through the entire corpus of the Talmud and the many rabbinic decisions and law codes that flowed from both, there are two categories of sin that apply here.

The first category is known as “sinat chinam,” baseless hatred. I’ll get to that after discussing the second category, one that involves misdeeds flowing from our lips and flowing into our ears. Overall, these misdeeds are classified as ona-at devarim, verbal wrongs. Under this rubric are found subcategories. These include two specifically relevant here: lashon hara, or bad speech, and motzi shem ra, or defamation of character, essentially spreading of false information about someone in order to belittle him or her.

Not all “bad speech” needs to be overt. The same result can be achieved covertly—along the “when did you stop beating your spouse” lines. No evidence of such behavior exists, and no one ever made such an accusation, but just asking the question of someone is enough to implant the possibility in people’s minds. This is motzi shem ra.

As I said, the verbal wrongs category involves the things we say, but also involves the things we’re willing to listen to—meaning the bad speech coming out of someone else’s mouth.

The Torah takes such sins very seriously, because out of the 613 supposed commandments in the Torah, 31 of them are about these verbal wrongs, speaking them and listening to them, because when we listen to someone known to violate the laws against bad speech, we’re encouraging that person’s behavior.

On Yom Kippur, we recite two confessionals, one of which is known as the Great Confessional and contains a list of 44 sins that we must atone for. Each item begins with the words “For the sin we have sinned before You,” or Ahl Chet shehchatanu l’fanehcha.” This list includes “the sin we have committed before You with the utterance of the lips..., the sin we have committed before You in speech…, the sin we have committed before You by impurity of lips…, by folly of the mouth…, by levity..., by deliberate lying..., by slander..., by the conversation of our lips..., by tale-bearing.”

That’s nine “sins” right there and they make up more than one out of every five on the list of sins for which we must atone on the Day of Atonement. It becomes even more overwhelming if we throw in some of the others, such as “for insincere confession,” “vain oaths,” and “hasty condemnation,” each of which also involves speech and has a very specific focus.

The Talmud teaches us that bad speech can kill, although that statement is meant as a metaphor. There are numerous examples in our world, though, of how it actually does kill. A couple of years ago, for example, a reporter uncovered the fact that a high-ranking military officer had exaggerated his accomplishments. It was not really a big deal in the scheme of things, and everyone agreed that the officer had done an excellent job in his post. Yet the reporter published the story anyway.

And the officer blew his brains out.

That is how dangerous bad speech can be. Lashon hara can kill. It can kill people and it can kill institutions.

Clearly, Judaism takes a very dim view of misusing speech to cause harm.

It takes a very dim view, as well, about committing the sin of baseless hatred, “sinat chinam.” 

Sinat chinam is characterized by animosity that lacks a justifiable cause. This includes jealousy, envy, unfounded suspicion, and other negative emotions that lead to hatred without legitimate reasons. It also includes speech that induces others to hate someone or something for no legitimate reason. Baseless hatred disrupts social cohesion and unity, leading to divisions within a community. It fosters an environment of mistrust and conflict, undermining the values of mutual respect and cooperation necessary for a community to survive and thrive.

Three laws found in Leviticus 19 form the basis for the sinat chinam category: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart... You shall love your neighbor as yourself….You shall love [the stranger] as yourself.” According to the Talmud, the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed because of baseless hatred.

It really should not require even the slightest bit of mental gymnastics to understand how Donald Trump violates each and every one of the laws of verbal wrongs and baseless hatred. These are all his stock in trade.

It also really should not require even the slightest bit of mental gymnastics to understand how the Republican Party violates these laws by giving Trump a platform with which to spew his hateful, hurtful, and often violent comments.

And, frankly, it also should not require even the slightest bit of mental gymnastics to understand how politicians of both parties engage in verbal wrongs and baseless hatred.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast, whenever that drops again this summer, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. I’d especially like to hear your views about whether I am, in fact, an idiot for blaming Trump for creating the atmosphere that led to his shooting on Saturday. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email please.

If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. The latest column focuses on President Biden’s insistence that only God can tell him to get out of the presidential race—and how God may have done just that in advice God gave to Moses.

Have a great rest of the week and a great weekend.

Especially with COVID-19 cases back on the rise in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, among 38 states reporting a rise in COVID cases right now, keep wearing those N95 masks in indoor venues no matter who tells you otherwise, and get fully vaccinated if you haven’t done so as yet, including both the third and fourth booster shots.

Stay healthy. And above all, stay safe.