America was cocked and ready for political tragedy because of the rhetoric employed by former President Donald Trump’s opponents, according to a new poll.

Trump survived an assassination attempt Saturday during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Rasmussen Reports surveyed Americans about the shooter’s motivation.

The poll found that 41 percent of likely voters believe the demonization of Trump — a staple of Democratic and media commentary about him — was the leading cause of the attempt.

It found 57 percent of Republicans, 26 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents said painting the former president as evil laid the groundwork for the attempt by Thomas Crooks to kill him.

According to the poll, 40 percent said mental health problems on the part of the gunman were the leading cause.

The survey of 995 likely voters was conducted Monday and Tuesday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that (Trump) is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to Trump’s attempted assassination.”

DEMOCRATS –
Strongly Agree: 27%
Somewhat Agree: 19%
Somewhat Disagree: 10%
Strongly Disagree:… https://t.co/NiCTTGJcpe

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) July 17, 2024

“Democrats have demonized Trump since 2016, and the harshness of their rhetoric, starting with President Joe Biden, has ramped up in recent months,” Nicole Russell noted in a column Wednesday in USA Today.

“While correlation doesn’t equal causation, no one should ignore the ugly rhetoric that preceded the assassination attempt on Trump and has continued in some quarters even after Saturday,” she wrote.

Biden has been front and center, Wallace said.

“In a July 5 post on X, Biden said that Trump ‘could become the dictator he promised to be.’ On June 28, he posted that Trump was ‘a genuine threat to this nation.’ ‘He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for,’ the post concluded,” she wrote.

“Outlets like The Washington Post, New Republic and New York try to influence public discourse. They are showing their readers not just what to think but how to think by distributing derogatory opinion disguised as responsible journalism,” Wallace said.

“They bear responsibility for pushing the narrative, not just that Trump’s policies were awful, but that he was basically Hitler,” she said, adding, “What’s more, these major news outlets didn’t hold each other accountable for propagating these images and inflamed rhetoric.”

With that as the background, Texas legislators want the House Oversight Committee to examine the Democratic and liberal media focus on demonizing Trump as a cause of the assassination attempt, according to Fox News.

Republican state Rep. Ellen Troxclair of Texas and about two dozen other GOP lawmakers fired off a letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, asking him to investigate “grotesque depictions of President Trump and the tens of millions of fellow Americans that support him as ‘enemies’ or ‘threats to democracy’ ahead of the assassination attempt.”

The Texans said Congress should “include within its hearing an examination of the political rhetoric used during this current presidential campaign and how it has contributed to a rising threat of political violence.”

“While we are blessed to live in a country where we have a constitutional right to free speech, this constant flammable rhetoric has a tangible detrimental impact on our country,” their letter read.

“The Oversight Committee is now uniquely situated to raise attention to the effect this has on the American people and to lead us back to a place of honest political discussion focused on policy positions,” they wrote.

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