Despite his own inflammatory rhetoric, Trump blames the Democrats for the heated mood

When former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in July, his first call was for unity. But that call didn't last long.

And after the alleged second attack on Sunday at his golf club in Florida, he took a decidedly different course.

Less than 24 hours later, Trump blamed Democrats for the political violence, telling Fox News Digital that the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was “the reason I got shot,” while claiming they were “destroying the country – both from within and without.”

Harris, he posted on social media, “has taken politics in our country to a whole new level of hate, abuse and distrust. Bullets are flying because of this communist left wing rhetoric and it's only going to get worse!”

He also claimed, without evidence, that the suspects in both cases were “radical leftists,” although their motives have not been publicly clarified. (Investigators are currently looking into suspect Ryan Wesley Routh of Florida's frustration with Trump's stance on Ukraine, sources told ABC News. In the shooting at the Pennsylvania rally, the suspected gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican but had also made a small donation to a progressive group in 2021.)

Regardless, Trump's running mate, Senator JD Vance, stuck to his strategy of blaming Democrats at a campaign rally in Michigan on Tuesday.

“I think it's time to say to the Democrats, the media and everyone who has been attacking and censoring this man for 10 years: Stop it or someone will get killed,” Vance said.

Susan Benesch, founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said it was impossible to place Trump's remarks “in any other context than his relentless use of violent rhetoric.”

“So he is a fraud,” said Benesch. “But that does not mean that it is wrong when he says that his political opponents describe him as a threat to democracy.”

Harris and Biden condemned Sunday's incident and expressed relief that Trump was safe. Biden called Trump and they had a “nice” conversation, the former president told ABC News. Harris said she also checked with Trump and “told him what I've said publicly: I said there is no place for political violence in our country.”

“We can and should have healthy debates and discussions and resolve differences, but not resort to violence to solve these problems,” Harris said.

Nevertheless, Trump's campaign team has released a list of over 50 quotes from Democrats that they believe led to the second assassination attempt. Most of them include statements from Biden, Harris and other party leaders portraying Trump as a “threat to democracy.”

These statements often came as lawmakers discussed Trump's false claims about the 2020 election, the events of January 6, 2021, or Trump's promise of political retaliation if elected in November.

The Republican leaders also point to a statement made by Democratic Representative Dan Goldman in 2023 in which he called Trump “destructive to democracy” and should be “eliminated.” Goldman apologized for this and said that while he believes Trump should be defeated in the election, he “certainly wishes him no harm and does not condone political violence.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked Tuesday whether President Biden would stop calling Trump a “threat to democracy” in light of recent developments. Jean-Pierre indicated he would not, saying he had a responsibility to “be honest with the American people” about the potential dangers posed by the former president.

Others have also noticed a contrast between Democrats' criticism of Trump and his more inflammatory – and sometimes blatantly false – statements on everything from election integrity to immigration to his targeted attacks on perceived political enemies.

In a more extreme example, Trump appeared to defend the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6 who chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” telling ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, “People were very angry.” However, Trump has strongly denied claims by former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson that she heard Trump repeatedly say “hang” while watching the attack on television, and she has provided no further evidence to support the claim.

“He used rhetoric to attack the peaceful transition of power. He used rhetoric to attack his opposition. No president has ever done that before. That's not normal and it's not democratic,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University.&M University.

“So when the Democrats bring this up, these are true facts, right?” she told ABC News.

Benesch, whose independent research team studies the rhetoric that incites violence, agreed that there is “no question that the boundaries of mainstream American discourse have shifted” since Trump entered politics.

“I think it's really important to recognize that he and his supporters are not the only ones speaking out in ways that normalize or even encourage violence today, but he and his supporters are doing so on a far larger scale than anyone else in American politics,” Benesch said.

Former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, who now co-hosts “The View,” wrote on X that everyone “has a duty to lower the temperature,” but that it was “simply dishonest of Trump” to [and] His allies should tell his opponents not to use the same language he regularly uses: fascist, enemy within, vermin, traitor, you will have no country.”

In response to experts who say Trump's own history of inflammatory rhetoric plays a major role in the increasingly threatening situation, the Trump team told ABC News: “Only one candidate in this election has been attacked twice, and that is not Kamala Harris.”

“The violence is coming from the political left and it is Kamala Harris' responsibility as the nominee of the Democratic Party to condemn the false, inflammatory lie that President Trump is a supposed threat to democracy,” said campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. “He is not and she knows it.”

Benesch said the solution to de-escalating the current atmosphere is for politicians or influential politicians to convincingly condemn the language of their own party, but she expressed little confidence that this would happen before the election.

“Unfortunately, no one has a political incentive to denounce such rhetoric on their own side or in their own group, but that is what is needed,” she said. “Or violence so severe that it terrifies politicians and influencers and demands that their own supporters back off a little.”