Heated rhetoric as Republicans blame Biden for Trump shooting

Within hours of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, his Republican supporters in Congress claimed they knew exactly who was responsible: Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Biden's campaign "rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination," Senator J.D. Vance, on Trump's shortlist for vice president, alleged shortly after Saturday's shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which the former US leader was wounded and one bystander killed.

Vance's comments were part of an escalating chorus of Republicans who have pinned the blame on Democrats -- even as the FBI says it has yet to identify the shooter's ideology.

They also heap more fuel onto the fire in a political atmosphere that has long been tense and fiercely polarized.

"Heated rhetoric has come from both sides" in recent years, Michael Bailey, a political science professor at Georgetown University, told AFP.

Republicans, for whom gun rights and a rejection of alleged government overreach are key themes, "have been more prone to marry such rhetoric with imagery related to guns," Bailey noted.

"And some of them (including Trump) did not cover themselves in glory when they made light of the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband," he said, referring to the 2022 attack by a conspiracy theorist on the high-profile Democrat's spouse.

Trump later mocked the Pelosis, and stoked further conspiracy theories around the assault.

Biden 'sent the orders'

Steve Scalise, a Republican who was shot in a 2017 attack on conservative lawmakers by a left-wing activist, has also blamed the left for Saturday's assassination attempt.

"Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America," he said.

"For years, and even today, leftist activists, Democrat donors and now even Joe Biden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump," Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita charged on X.

Biden did recently tell donors that it was "time to put Trump in the bullseye," according to comments put out by his campaign -- though he was speaking in the context of focusing the party on beating Trump.

Representative Mike Collins went further on the shooting, stating "Joe Biden sent the orders," without offering credible evidence.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, offered an escalation of her own, telling her followers "we are in a battle between good and evil" and casting Democrats as "the party of pedophiles" and "violence."

"The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump," she said.

Such accusations risk removing "attention from the very welcome, widespread condemnation of the attack," said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

'America needs to stop'

The heated rhetoric pushed Biden to issue a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday in which he called on Americans to "lower the temperature."

Trump and Biden have spoken to each other after the incident, while Biden's campaign is temporarily pausing television ads -- part of what some on both sides hope is part of a broader national cooling.

"Tensions are high on both sides, and I think we've got to tone down the rhetoric," 60-year-old Trump supporter Martin Kutzler told AFP in downtown Milwaukee, where the Republican convention is set to open Monday.

Republican National Committee chair Michael Whately meanwhile declined to speculate on the shooting while speaking to "Fox News Sunday."

"Right now, I think everybody in America needs to stop. They need to pause," he said.

Among elected officials, though, the accusations keep coming.

"When the message goes out constantly, that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy, and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment," said House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Depoliticizing the shooting, however, is essential, Bailey said.

"In an environment with so many guns... it is possible for heated rhetoric to motivate an unbalanced person on any side."