President Donald Trump has not toned down the rhetoric that contributed to the assassination of a Democratic lawmaker last year, according to a contributor to the local newspaper from that region.
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“One year ago this week, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home in Brooklyn Park,” wrote Steve Reuter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “The man who pulled the trigger was the cause of their deaths, in the way we most readily understand cause. The proximate one, the hand on the weapon, the figure we can name and try and convict.”
Reuter added, “But he was not the only cause. The harder causes are the ones we will have to look at if we want fewer June mornings like that one.”
From there, Reuter characterized Trump’s heated language about Democrats and other opponents as a thermostat, one that not only measures the temperature of conversation but sets it as well.
“When a political leader describes opponents as enemies, as vermin, as traitors, as something less than fully people, the leader is not merely venting or persuading,” Reuter wrote. “The leader is setting a temperature. And the people who take their cues from that leader calibrate to it, usually without noticing they are doing it. The words travel down. They teach. They establish what a person is now permitted to feel about a neighbor whose yard sign offended them.”
Assassin Vance Boelter, who pleaded guilty to the federal charges last week, acted as he did because of the tone that Trump set, according to Reuter.
“Responsibility does not end at the boundary of what we intend,” Reuter argued. “It extends to what we make permissible. This is an uncomfortable widening of the circle because it implicates far more people than the one who acted; it implicates everyone who helped load the language while keeping their own hands clean.”
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Even in the immediate aftermath of the Hortman assassination, NewsNation contributor and podcaster Chris Cillizza reported that Senate Democrats were outraged at what appeared to be a doubling down of incendiary rhetoric — on that occasion, directly tied to the murders of Hortman and others by Boelter.
“You’re a United States Senator. Wake the f— up,” Cillizza reports former Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT.) telling U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) last year, referring to a post by Lee that “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.”
Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) later said that she personally approached Lee over spreading misinformation about Boelter’s murders.
“I wanted him to hear from me directly about how painful that was, and how brutal it was, to see that on what was just a horribly brutal weekend,” Smith said. “He didn’t say a lot, frankly. I think he was a bit stunned.”
Lee’s office also received a harsh letter from a member of Smith’s staff on the subject.
“You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats,” the letter argued. “… Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency? … I pray to God that none of you ever go through anything like this. I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings.”
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