Analysis: Vance warns calling a candidate a ‘fascist’ can lead to violence but doesn’t mention that’s what Trump calls Harris
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Washington (CNN) — In the wake of the apparent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on Sunday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, argued in a speech in Georgia on Monday that the two recent attempts to kill Trump are evidence that “the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out; somebody’s going to get hurt by it.”
Moments prior, Vance had criticized a Democratic congressman for saying last year that Trump must be “eliminated.” (The congressman apologized for a “poor choice of words,” saying he had been trying to talk about how Trump must be defeated in the election.) And Vance said: “Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it is going to be the end of American democracy.”
What Vance didn’t mention was that Trump has repeatedly told the American people that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a fascist whose election would mean the end of the country itself.
In fact, Trump called Harris a fascist at least twice last week alone.
“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Trump said at an Arizona rally on Thursday.
“This is a radical-left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” Trump said while attacking Harris at a news conference on Friday.
This wasn’t new rhetoric. “We have a fascist person running who’s incompetent,” Trump told Virginia residents during a campaign stop in August; at an Arizona rally in August, Trump said the true divide in American politics is between patriots with traditional values and “these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group.”
And Trump has gone beyond saying that electing Harris would mean an end to American democracy. He has said this summer that electing Harris would mean “you’re not going to have a country anymore” and that “we’re not going to have a country left.”
A Vance spokesperson did not immediately respond to CNN’s request on Tuesday to explain whether Vance is calling on Trump to tone down his language, and, if not, what Vance sees as the difference between Trump’s words and the words from “the left” he was denouncing.
Vance argued in his Monday speech that there is not a “both-sides problem.” He said that while he acknowledges conservatives do not “always get things exactly right,” he said that the fact that “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months” demonstrates that the issue of incendiary rhetoric about presidential candidates is a one-side-only concern.
But Harris has faced violent threats for years, including in recent months. In August alone, a Virginia man and a Tennessee man were separately charged with making death threats against her.
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