It is difficult to predict what effect Saturday's events will have on America and its political discourse. Already, there have been calls from both parties to cool rhetoric and call for national unity.
Within hours of the incident, President Joe Biden, Trump's leading rival in the November presidential election, appeared before cameras in Delaware and made a statement to the press.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It's disgusting,” he said. “We can't afford to do this. We can't tolerate this.”
The president later spoke by phone with the former president, who cut short his beach weekend and returned to the White House late Saturday evening.
But the violence quickly devolved into the bare-knuckled partisan trench warfare that has characterized American politics in recent decades. Some Republican politicians blamed the attacks on Democrats, who used lurid rhetoric to claim the former president posed a threat to American democracy.
“The core premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s likely vice presidential nominee, wrote on social media. “That investigation led directly to the assassination attempt on President Trump.”
Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said “left-wing activists, Democratic donors, even Joe Biden” should be held accountable for their “disgusting rhetoric” on the November ballot, which he said led to Saturday’s attack.
Democrats may object, but many on the left used similar language to describe the right’s rhetoric in the months leading up to the near-death shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
