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Long before the explosives were dis- covered, violent rhetoric had emerged as a central theme in the closing days of the midterm elections, particularly for the GOP. Republicans derided protest- ers for disrupting GOP lawmakers or Trump officials at restaurants or other public places. While campaigning, Trump and leading Republican can- didates have increasingly warned of a rising Democratic “mob” prepared to inflict physical harm upon its adversar- ies.
But even some Trump allies saw the events of Wednesday as a moment for reflection and urged Trump to tone it down.
“You gotta calm it down,” said An- thony Scaramucci, a prominent Trump supporter who briefly worked in his ad- ministration. “The president has grown in the job. He now has to take another transcendental step and realize that he’s got to dial down the rhetoric.”
On the other end of the political spectrum, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, offered a message to “all public officials of all partisan af- filiations.” ‘’Don’t encourage violence,” he said. “Don’t encourage hatred. Don’t encourage attacks on media.”
De Blasio added: “That has to start at the top.”
The White House’s political arm,
the Republican National Committee, released a video less than two weeks ago entitled, “The Left: An Unhinged Mob” that featured liberal protesters banging on doors backed by aggressive rhetoric from several prominent Democrats, in- cluding Rep. Maxine Waters of Califor- nia and Hilary Clinton.
Waters in June called on supporters to harass Trump’s cabinet members in public, while Clinton this month said: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”
Clinton is among a handful of top Democrats, including former Presi- dent Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who were target- ed with explosive devices, authorities said Wednesday. The New York offices of CNN, the cable network frequently attacked by Trump and his supporters,
was evacuated after receiving an explo- sive device and an envelope containing white powder. Billionaire Democrat George Soros, a regular focus of conser- vative conspiracy theories, was targeted on Monday.
In a written statement, CNN Presi- dent Jeff Zucker decried what he called “a total and complete lack of under- standing at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media.”
For a moment, at least, Trump of- fered a somewhat conciliatory message during a Wednesday evening political appearance in Wisconsin.
“There is one way to settle our agree- ments. It’s called peacefully at the ballot box,” Trump said while reading from the teleprompter. He later described Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin as a “radical far-left” socialist and said “our country is assaulted” by
a caravan of thousands of Latin Ameri- can immigrants, still about 1,000 miles away.
The president is expected to continue an aggressive campaign schedule in the midterm season’s final days.
For virtually his entire political career, Trump has embraced inflamma- tory and often deeply personal attacks against his opponents. He repeatedly encouraged supporters to physically attack liberal protesters during the campaign, offering to pay for their legal bills. He regularly calls media outlets such as CNN “the enemy of the people.”
Yet the rhetoric has sometimes turned darker in recent weeks.
“The Democrats are willing to do anything, to hurt anyone, to get the power they so desperately crave,” Trump declared at a Minnesota rally this month. “They want to resist, they want to obstruct, they want to delay, demolish. They want to destroy.”
He warned this week, without proof, that terrorists had infiltrated a cara- van of Central American immigrants headed toward the U.S. border. He also praised a Republican congressman from Montana for body slamming a reporter.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, believes there is no “moral equivalence” between
the violent rhetoric of the two parties, according to Heidi Beirich, the head of the organization’s Intelligence Project.
“The fact of the matter is that the people who have received these bombs — the Clintons, Obama and George Soros — have been horrifically demon- ized by the right. Not just in terms of neo-Nazis, but also from people like Donald Trump,” Beirich said. “There tends to be a relationship between de- monizing rhetoric and violence.”
Yet Republican voters across the country are equally convinced that Democrats pose the real threat. And Republican candidates are going out of their way to reinforce that message.
At a weekend campaign appearance at a Florida retirement community, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis attacked Waters and Holder by name for calling on Democrats to harass Repub- licans. He also recalled the 2017 Capitol Hill shooting that left several wounded, including Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
“We don’t want the state of Florida to be the petri dish of George Soros and the radical left,” DeSantis charged. “You look at the stuff that’s going on with these mobs and the violence that they’re doing.”
Clinton, speaking at a Florida fund- raiser for congressional candidate Donna Shalala, thanked the U.S. Secret Service for intercepting the package be- fore it reached her suburban New York City home. But she called it a “troubling time” and a “time of deep divisions,
and we have to do everything we can to bring our country together.”
Voters in key midterm battlegrounds are fed up, and frightened.
Ariana Hendricks, a 40-year-old mas- sage therapist in Denver, said violence in politics has always been something people thought about.
But because of Trump, she said, “now they think it’s OK.”
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Thomas reported from Washington. AP writers Nick Riccardi in Denver, Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, Matthew Daly in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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