David Myers | Sheridan Press
 Sep 19, 2024 

After the first attempt on Donald Trump’s life, I wrote to the press to express my dismay that the actions of Democrats didn’t match the intensity of their rhetoric. I obliquely blamed talk of Trump’s candidacy as a threat to democracy for fanning the flames of violence in our already violent society. And while I still consider disingenuous rabble rousing to be unproductive and ineffective, after this second attempt on the former president’s life, I’m inclined to reassess the cause of the violence that seems to swirl around this particular man. 

In a 2016 speech, President Barrack Obama chided Republicans dismayed that Trump was their nominee: “The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years.”

The point was that Republicans had knowingly embraced false conspiracies to gain votes. They said the Clintons had people killed to cover up corruption. They said Obama was Muslim and/or not a citizen. They said Vice President Biden influenced Ukraine to benefit his family. These are lies that some Republican voters still believe.

And the GOP’s still at it (even right here in Sheridan County). The false claims of 2020 election fraud, the baseless assertion that non-citizen voting will influence the 2024 election, the disgusting, racist claim that legal Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets… Every false conspiracy the Republicans have dangled in front of the base has led to violence threatened or committed by people unable to see that these politicians are just frauds trying to get votes by any means.

Later in Obama’s 2016 speech he said, “All that bile, all the exaggeration, all the stuff that wasn’t grounded in fact just kind of bubbled up, started surfacing… You can’t wait until that finally happens and then say, ‘oh that’s too much, that’s enough’”

The “tiger” that Obama was talking about was Republican pandering to the most destructive parts of the American identity to scare people into voting for them. Trump and his party have been riding that tiger for more than two decades, from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich to J.D. Vance. So, maybe they shouldn’t be surprised to find out that a tiger bites; that crazy conspiracy mongering incites crazy conspiracists to action. And they have the gall to blame Democrats. That’s just stupid. Why would we wish violence on a man we hope to humiliate at the ballot box again? This is a problem fueled by Republicans, and Republicans need to fix their party to start changing it.

David Myers

Sheridan