No, You Can't Blame David French for Trump's Would-Be Assassins

Rhetoric is powerful. But not more powerful than human will.

In a short but direct post at First Things, Rusty Reno lays some of the blame for the attempts on Donald Trump’s life at the feet of David French. Reno writes:

The day after the assassination attempt in Florida, the New York Times published a column by David French on Trump’s “deeply alarming” statements and actions. According to French, the former president made “a corrupt and lunatic request” to Ukrainian president Zelensky in 2019. French suggests that Trump conducted his foreign policy “on the basis of his personal grievances” and not in accord with America’s national interest. The column ends with a warning that Trump is a deranged madman and that “there is no one left who can stop him from doing his worst.” What are readers to conclude? 

Well, I think readers can and do conclude all sorts of things, some legitimate and others not so much. And here I’ll be as simple and direct as I can: Any reader who concludes that the David French column in question was inviting, condoning, or wishing for an assassination tempt is seeing what they expect and/or want to see, not what’s actually there.

I’ve been on the record criticizing some of French’s writing the last few years. To repeat myself: I think he has allowed Trump and Trumpism to ruthlessly colonize his attention. I think he has let real suffering he’s experienced at the hands of sinful churchgoers to take over his thinking. And I think his columns over the last couple of years have been, in function if not intent, a kind of pandering to a center-left audience at the expense of both fairness and clear-mindedness.

But what Reno is suggesting is different. In context, clearly French was referring to the departures of several high ranking staff members from Trump’s inner circle. The point was that in regards to foreign policy, Trump’s current inner circle cannot (in French’s view) push back on him the way the previous inner circle could and did.

I would think Reno knows this. In fact, Reno’s column mirrors the very things he complains about in French’s, and I would argue that both Reno and French commit the same fallacy, a ubiquitous error that begs for correction. Reno and French are both minimizing moral agency for evildoers, while maximizing the moral agency of rhetoric. This is wrong, illogical, and a pointless carousel of blame.

It’s true that rhetoric matters. How we talk about those we disagree with matters. The verbs, adjectives, and metaphors we choose have power to create mental images that can excite even more powerful feelings. Of course, it is journalists—columnists, editors, reporters, etc.—who are obliged to think about this the most. Their work is words. Their livelihood is language.

I have some sympathy with the observation made by many that the phrase “culture war,” and many of the militant metaphors that accompany our political debates (“They want to destroy America,” “We must wipe out this ideology,” etc.), can sow seeds of real violence. This is especially true in a media economy that increasingly makes no distinction between public and private language, between a single sentence and a paragraph that gives it context, or between an intended audience and the mass of humanity to whom the language is “leaked.” We have too many microphones picking up too many voices that reach too many listeners. Where words are many, sin is not lacking (Prov. 10:19).

But I fear that what is actually happening is a systemic watering down of moral responsibility. Words do matter, but there is a very real barrier between words and action. The two men who have attempted to assassinate Donald Trump may well have had their imaginations greased by culture war vocabulary, but it wasn’t the columns or the tweets that loaded their rifle, turned on their car, drove them to the place, or pulled the trigger for them.

Obviously I realize that Reno is not suggesting otherwise. What he is suggesting is that, amid an incredibly distressing string of attempted murder, somebody—other than the actual criminals—must be to blame. He is suggesting that these violent acts do not happen unless they are coaxed out. And he believes that French’s closing line about there being “no one left who can stop” Trump does the coaxing.

Now what’s really interesting here is that David’s column was making the exact same argument—about Trump’s rhetoric. Here is how French opens his piece:

When Trump repeated the ridiculous rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating household pets, he not only highlighted once again his own vulnerability to conspiracy theories, it also put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger. Bomb threats have forced two consecutive days of school closings and some Haitian immigrants are now “scared for their lives.”

French argues right out of the gate that Trump “put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger” by repeating an Internet meme. His logic here is almost identical to Reno’s. There’s surely a sense in which French is right; namely, that many of the (thankfully uneventful) bomb threats against Springfield likely wouldn’t have happened if Trump hadn’t said what he did. But like Reno, French draws a straight line between rhetoric and behavior that doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny. Trump did not call for his loyalists to descend on Springfield. He did not call for violence against Haitians. He repeated a rumor in the context of talking about a serious issue, immigration, and the rumor was fact-checked by every news network in the West (many of whom declined to fact-check any of Kamala Harris’s claims).

A person who calls a bomb threat against a migrant community because they heard a rumor about someone eating cats is a person whose conscience has failed them in a way that no amount of rhetoric can account for. Why? Because 99.9% of the millions of people who heard Donald Trump say that did not call in a bomb threat. Rhetoric can help bad people become more willing to do bad things, but it does not make bad people do anything.

I get that underneath this are complex questions of moral formation. After all, this newsletter is dedicated to studying the effects of technology. I’m not one to deny that our habits and habitats affect the kind of people we become. But it seems to me there is a greater willingness among the chattering class to ascribe moral blame to rhetoric than to evildoers. An “incel” who murders innocent people himself evaporates into the ether as the conversation focuses on the podcasts and “toxic masculinity” that must have compelled him. A ministry leader who sexually abuses someone is far less interesting to the media eye than the books on his nightstand, whose ideas surely must be responsible.

Rhetoric is not nearly as powerful as rhetoricians believe. It is not as potent as we often suggest, either for evil or good. The best rhetoric and the worst rhetoric tend to have about the same breadth of effect. Why? Because human beings are not empty shells into which rhetoric is placed. We are willing to believe, feel, and do all sorts of things before the rhetoric that makes us feel justified ever hits our ears.

Consider the world in which these assassination attempts have happened. Ours is a world of tremendous isolation. Bitterness and resentment—toward government, the opposite sex, and humanity in general—grows well in isolation. People are less likely than in any generation prior to live near family, to have meaningful friendships, to work fulfilling tasks, or to worship something greater than a political party or sports team. Alcohol flows, “dispensaries” proliferate, schools flounder, and American pop culture is an unceasing reminder that you will never be as happy as you were a long time ago.

Consider the possibility for a moment that the vast, vast majority of humanity are not on the edge of their seat every morning wondering what the pundits will say on TV or in their email inbox. Consider the possibility that the vast, vast majority of “rhetoric” is remunerated but not remembered, clicked but not carefully considered. Then consider the possibility that the increasing political violence in our country, not just against one man but against other people too, might not be a straightforward consequence of the rival party’s rhetoric, but a fiercer symptom of a deeper pathology.

It is a pathology that I worry may be even affecting First Things. A few weeks ago, a podcaster named Daryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to blast Winston Churchill and humanize the Third Reich. His revisionism has been ably answered by the historian Andrew Roberts. But Justin Lee, currently First Things’s associate editor, jumped into the fray with a post on X suggesting anyone upset at Cooper’s arguments was protecting a “myth.”

If First Things is now feeling confusion over who the good guys were in World War II, their struggles go far beyond overstating the power of rhetoric. But perhaps this all makes sense. Perhaps, in the worldview of both Christian Nationalism and center-left appeasement, rhetoric is all there is. There is no moral responsibility to avoid, only friends to support and enemies to catch.

We dare not lose the ability to say that even people we dislike are not directly responsible for everything bad. The beeline we are making from wickedness to “rhetoric” will bring about change in ourselves no less than in others. Once we commit ourselves to this direction, there is very little we cannot excuse.