Hours after former President Donald Trump narrowly avoided a second assassination attempt, NBC News’ Lester Holt fanned the flames of violence by blaming Trump’s “rhetoric” rather than the suspected would-be assassin, who once praised Holt.

United States Secret Service agents fired shots at a man on Sunday after they discovered him allegedly staked out in a bush at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach armed with a scoped “AK-47-style rifle.” A suspect was later apprehended by authorities and remains in custody.

This was the second assassination attempt on Trump’s life.

Within days of Trump surviving the first assassination attempt in July that left a father of two dead, Democrats and the media implored the nation to “lower the temperature” (while ignoring their own role in “stoking the flames of hatred against Trump and his supporters,” as my colleague Jordan Boyd points out). It was a short-lived plea, because the left returned to their assassination prep campaign playbook almost immediately, calling Trump the next Hitler, a “threat to democracy” and an “existential danger” to the country.

Keeping in line with his fellow propagandists, Holt took to the air on Sunday to blame Trump for the attempted assassination by linking him to unsubstantiated bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.

“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself,” Holt said. “Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in [Springfield] Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.”

The man detained by authorities, identified as Ryan Routh, once praised Holt in a post on Twitter three years ago for his “editorial closing” during a May 26, 2021 show. Routh’s account has since been suspended, but The Federalist obtained a screenshot of the post before it was taken off the Internet. A separate video posted to X by Billboard Chris also confirms the post was made at the 3:46 mark.

“I so enjoyed todays editorial closing that recognized our ignorance and pushed us to behave better —I would like that to happen every day …. please use your platform to make us all better people ….Thanks..,” Routh’s post, directed at Holt, read.

But Holt didn’t use his platform on Sunday to push people to “behave better.” Instead, he used his platform to advanced the type of dangerous propaganda designed to justify and incite the most extreme behaviors.

The bomb threats Holt refers to “have not been substantiated and may be indicative of ‘swatting,'” a Springfield spokesperson said, according to WHIO TV. Yet Holt deliberately linked the threats to Trump and Vance all because they helped elevate to the national level how the Biden-Harris administration’s radical immigration policies have overwhelmed small towns like Springfield with thousands of migrants.

The message is clear: speak out against the regime and its propaganda machine will work overtime to justify violence against you so that if it happens again, everyone will be desensitized and indifferent.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2