Former President Donald Trump on Monday said that the volleys of hate speech fired at him by his political opponents inspire attempts to assassinate him.
On Sunday, 58-year-old Ryan Routh was arrested after police believe he planned to assassinate Trump, but was foiled by a Secret Service agent who saw Routh’s gun as he hid in the shrubbery of Trump International Golf Course.
Trump said Routh is a pawn in the Democratic Party’s game.
“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
“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,” he said.
Trump said President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris try to fool the nation into thinking they want unity.
“They are the opposite,” Trump said. “These are people that want to destroy our country.”
“It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat,” he added.
Routh wrote on social media this year that “Democracy is on the ballot” and that Democrats “cannot lose.”
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Trump said Democratic tactics include ” a combination of rhetoric and lawsuits they wrap me up in,” Trump said.
“These are the things that dangerous fools, like the shooter, listen to — that is the rhetoric they listen to, and the same with the first one,” he said, referring to the July 13 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left Trump with a wounded ear.
“They use highly inflammatory language,” Trump said of Democrats. “I can use it too — far better than they can — but I don’t.”
Trump said the media are no better.
“The media is made up of fools that will spew [Democrats’] garbage and spew their sick philosophies and will protect them at all costs, and they can’t believe they get away with it,” Trump said. “Democrats are totally protected by the media.”
In her New York Post column, Miranda Devine called out “the hateful rhetoric constantly aimed at Trump by his political opponents.
Harris and Biden “and their surrogates constantly exaggerate the J6 Capitol riot and use it to frame Trump as a ‘threat to democracy.’ Biden has labeled Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ as ‘semi-fascists’ and domestic terrorists.”
“Tim Walz called Trump a ‘fascist’ and a ‘threat to Democracy’ who will ‘put people’s lives in danger,’” Devine wrote.
“What will it take for these demented partisans to lower the temperature?” she continued.
Even before Sunday’s attempt on his life, Trump said Democratic rhetoric was responsible for the first attempt on his life.
“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said during last week’s debate, according to WTAE-TV.
“They talk about democracy, ‘I’m a threat to democracy.’ They’re the threat to democracy,” Trump said.
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