Hyperbole and hatred: can heated rhetoric kill?

"The classic example of chutzpah," said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times, "is that of the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan." The 2024 presidential election has given us a new version: the candidate who merrily stokes hatred and division, then turns around to condemn his opponents' harsh language.

Following the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance took a break from spreading inflammatory lies about Haitian migrants eating pets to make a cynical plea for reasonable discourse. "Look," he declared, "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." The Left needs to "tone down" its language, he said, or "somebody is gonna get hurt". Trump himself claimed that the Democrats' rhetoric "is causing me to be shot at". This is the man who told his supporters to "fight like hell" to regain the White House before the 6 January riots, and who has consistently abused his political rivals.

Typical of Trump to turn the violence against him "into fuel for more political hatred", said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a little over two weeks. He didn't blame his opponents, or seek to fundraise off the back of the attacks; he just started wearing a trench coat with a zip-in Kevlar vest.

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There's hypocrisy on all sides here, said Robby Soave in Reason. Trump has called Kamala Harris a fascist, and Vance himself once described Trump as America's Hitler. In 2011, Republicans rightly criticised the Democrats for "lazily and falsely" seeking to blame them for the shooting of the Democrat congresswoman Gabby Giffords by a disturbed loner. We should be wary of attempts to "draw any causal line" between heated political language and real-world violence.

It would be nice, though, if public debate in the US could be a little less overwrought, said John Halpin on Substack. One problem is that presidential elections are just too long. Other nations, such as the UK, wrap up their campaigns in weeks. When the US votes in November, it will have been "waging presidential warfare for 700-plus days": two years of incessant arguing and hyperbole.

Every election is now "the most important election of our lifetime" as the two polarised parties and their media cheerleaders raise the stakes to absurd levels. If the other side wins it means "communism" or "fascism" and "civil war". It's enough to "drive decent people crazy – and crazy people even nuttier". In an ideal world, we'd simplify the process. But given all the money to be made selling chaos, rage and mutual loathing, "nothing much is likely to change".