J.D. Vance sticks his foot in his mouth once again.
Photo: Ryan Collerd/AFP/Getty Images
From the moment a second assassination attempt against Donald Trump was foiled in Florida this week, Team Trump has been accusing Democrats of inciting violence against the 45th president by calling out his dangerous extremism. The idea, of course, is to neutralize a significant Kamala Harris campaign argument that Trump has proved himself again and again to be a threat to democratic norms.
All the tut-tutting from the Trump campaign and its allies about name-calling is pretty rich coming from the camp of the politician who has raised personal insults and smears to a central place in every campaign he’s ever run. But the attempted shaming of people for being mean to the former president reached a new level in Atlanta at the hands of J.D. Vance, as the New York Times reports:
In a speech on Monday in Georgia, Mr. Vance said that Mr. Trump’s political opponents had crossed a line with their language, which he suggested had played a role in what the authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt directed at Mr. Trump while he was golfing in Florida on Sunday.
“Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and, if he’s elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy,” Mr. Vance said at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner.
Now, to be clear, in journalistic and progressive (and even “Never Trump” Republican) activist circles, there has been an eternal and ongoing debate about the extent to which Trump’s MAGA movement is fascist or at least fascist adjacent. It kind of comes with the territory when you have a political leader who just last week in a nationally televised event repeatedly touted the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orban as a role model and validator. But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have not gone over the brink and publicly called Trump a fascist.
You know who does throw around that particular f-word? That’s right, Vance’s running mate, as the Times noted:
Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “fascist” on at least five occasions, including at a rally on Thursday in Arizona and during a news conference on Friday near Los Angeles.
“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Mr. Trump said in Tucson, Ariz.
Now, it’s true that Trump and his allies don’t use the word “fascist” with any precision, as campaign spokesman Steven Cheung illustrated when asked about his boss’s use of “fascist”:
“As President Trump correctly points out, Kamala Harris is a radical leftist, Marxist, communist and fascist because she is hell bent on destroying America by continuing her disastrous policies that have hurt people all across the country,” Mr. Cheung said. Mr. Trump has also called for Democrats to tone down their speech, using his own harsh language to do so.
All these heavily freighted signifiers of ideological extremism are not interchangeable, even in the aggressively stupid lexicon of MAGA World, and none should be applied to politicians just because you believe (or want others to believe) their policies have failed. But if Trump wants to continue this calumny, his running mate should be estopped from complaining about its imagined use by others.
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