GOP Gaslighting and Trump’s Cycle of Abuse
It’s crystal clear what’s going on here, and we can’t fall for it.
Following the horrifying shooting on Saturday that left one Trump rally-goer dead, the ex-president is trying to ride the moment and appear as a unifier, not a divider.
We should be deeply skeptical.
Trump told the press, which dutifully reported on his shift, that he plans to change his acceptance speech on Thursday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He intends to shift away from his usual divisive tone of attacking Joe Biden toward one that will be “a chance to bring the country together.”
And like some kind of Ebenezer Scrooge who has had a vision of his own death, Trump even claims he’s feeling “spiritual” following the attempt on his life.
Donald Trump. Spiritual. Okay…
This pivot isn’t occurring in a political vacuum. It follows a drumbeat of accusations by people within Trump’s close circle that it was somehow the Democrats’ rhetoric that led to the attempted assassination. They want us to simply forget that Donald Trump made talk of political violence commonplace beginning in 2015 when he first declared for the presidency.
Today, I want to walk through examples of how the GOP and Trump are trying to gaslight the entire nation, with an unfortunate assist from the press, and how we should recognize and call it out for what it is and push back. I also will discuss how Trump’s “spiritual” awakening and claim to be a “uniter” is not only laughable but dangerous, falling squarely within a classic cycle of abuse.
“Look what you made happen!”
Across the MAGA right, the theme since Saturday has been consistent: The Democrats are to blame for the attack, and “they” tried to kill him.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” wrote Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who is also up for VP. “That rhetoric directly led to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Another sycophantic senator, Tim Scott (R-SC), tweeted this gem. “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
The No. 2 Republican in the House, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), was in accord. “For weeks, Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” he said. “Clearly, we’ve seen far-left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.
Don Jr. also chimed in, citing statements by President Biden warning of the dangers of a Trump dictatorship:
Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a “dictator” and a “threat to Democracy” wasn’t some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!!
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) was particularly unhinged over the shooting, tweeting:
We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL
The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars.
They want to lock up their political opponents, and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it.
The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.
Let’s be clear about what this is about. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote in The Guardian, a central premise of the Biden campaign is that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, personal freedoms and the rule of law. But now, the GOP hopes, every time a Democrat says this, the GOP can claim they are putting Trump’s life at risk. The goal is to silence all such talk and kneecap the most potent, and most obviously true, attacks upon Trump.
Never mind that there is still zero evidence that the shooter was motivated in any way by Democratic messaging. Indeed, most of the evidence, however anecdotal and circumstantial, points to the notion that the shooter came from within the MAGA house. Thomas Crooks, a white male who was 20 years old, was a firearms aficionado and a gun club member as well as a registered Republican. Some of his classmates told reporters that he wore hunting gear to school and took consistently “definitely conservative” positions in class, even while many in Crooks’s tight-knit community remain shocked that someone so outwardly mild-mannered could do something like this.
In the past two days, Biden has come out forcefully against political violence, seeking to emphasize how he, in contrast to Trump, is the voice of reason and calm in this fraught political environment. He asked directly for a turning down of the political temperature. That is both reassuring and smart, assuming the other side is truly seen as fomenting more chaos and violence.
This brings us to and helps explain Trump’s attempted pivot this week. Trump now wants us to somehow believe that he is the real uniter, and that he has had some kind of “spiritual” awakening following the attempt on his life.
But an orange tiger, even a paper one like Trump, can’t so easily change its stripes.
Trump’s record as a divider and instigator of political violence
As someone who has covered the past five presidents, Peter Baker noted in his analysis in the Times that Trump has a long history of encouraging violence. He listed many examples, and I’ve added a few of my own:
Trump urged supporters at rallies to beat up protestors.
He called for Black Lives Matter rioters to be shot.
He used racist language to inflame hate and hate-based attacks against Asian American during the pandemic.
He made fun of the brutal attack upon Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
He mocked the notion that radicals had plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
His words helped inspire racist mass shooters in Buffalo and El Paso.
He approved of chants to “Hang Mike Pence.”
And he incited the violent January 6 attack upon the Capitol.
Now Trump wants us to believe he is a changed man, a “uniter” of us all after what happened. I’m no psychiatrist, but we should be skeptical of a cruel man suddenly acting sweet and reasonable.
The cycle of abuse
Many experts have deemed Trump, and rightly so, a malignant narcissist with whom the U.S. has been in a long, abusive relationship. Two hallmarks of such a relationship include outright denials that the abuse is even happening (a classic gaslighter’s ploy) and a period where the victim (that’s us) believes that somehow the abuser has reformed himself.
We’re about to enter that cycle in the next few days while the RNC gathers, and we should be clear-eyed about what Trump is trying to pull.
While abusive cycles are not always the same, it’s important to recognize when we might be falling into a classic pattern. There are many versions of this “cycle of abuse” out there, but here’s one ease of reference:
Trump’s instincts here, per usual, are spot on. As I noted in my piece on Sunday morning, if the country feels like it’s teetering on the edge of chaos and political violence, voters may flock to Joe Biden as a reliable rudder that will steady our national vessel. The notion that Trump can somehow be a stabilizing force is absurd, but that is now what he will try to sell the American people, even as his acolytes and surrogates continue to foment discord and flip the truth upside down.
Finally, by no means should Democrats fall into their trap and self-censor around Trump as an existential threat to democracy, individual rights and the rule of law. Trump remains the head of a fascist MAGA movement, has deployed the rhetoric of Nazi Germany against his opponents and vulnerable communities, plans to act on Day One as a dictator, is deeply tied to Project 2025 and its blueprint to take over and transform our government, and has promised political retribution and amplified calls for arrests and show trials of his political opponents.
None of that changed after the attempt on his life by a lone right-wing assassin. While it was fine and wise for President Biden to call for a pause on negative advertising and political attacks to allow temperatures to cool over the weekend, when the fascist MAGA party meets this week in Milwaukee the Democratic Party must meet the threat head on.
That means calling out their transparent attempts to soften their political extremism and never backing down from the plain truth: Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are an existential threat to our very way of life, and we can and must defeat them at the ballot box this November.
Aileen Cannon timed it perfectly.
The party who says there’ll be a “bloodbath” if their candidate loses in November wants us to cool it with the rhetoric, you guys.