As Republicans call for Democrats to tamp down their rhetoric after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Butler County rally on Saturday, Pittsburgh-area Congresswoman Summer Lee said that the ugliness of current political debate was “not a both-sides situation.”
And on Monday, she told reporters that the need to protect marginalized communities from the GOP should provide a focus for Democrats even amid questions about President Joe Biden’s ability to effectively campaign.
After touring Hill District grocer Salem’s Market with U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, Lee told a handful of reporters that “political violence in every form … all of it should be condemned.” And “these are frightening times,” she said. “The rhetoric is so heated, and it has been for years. And it’s important that we talk about where it comes from, and the reality is that it has come from the GOP.”
Criticism of elected officials is part of the democratic process, she said, but “it’s different to criticize trans folks, Black and brown folks, disabled folks,” who are vulnerable. In the wake of the shooting Saturday, she said, Republicans were making “an attempt right now to pretend that we haven't seen explicit calls from right-wing media, from elected officials … we work with every day, who put a target on our head.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have invoked Saturday’s shooting to underscore their criticism of Democratic utterances — even though there’s no clear sign that the accused shooter was motivated by political convictions of any stripe.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, for one, penned a July 14 commentary for the Wall Street Journal in which he argued that “Mr. Trump’s critics need to acknowledge that he isn’t Hitler or the devil.
"Too many critics didn’t accept Mr. Trump’s first election victory in 2016 as legitimate," he wrote. "[T]hey’ve painted him — and by extension his fellow Republicans — as a national threat that must be eliminated.”
McCormick acknowledged that extremist rhetoric “has also gained currency on the political right,” and in fact Trump himself has refused to accept the 2020 election as legitimate: He called his loss in Pennsylvania “a rigged deal” in his speech Saturday.
But even as Republicans gather optimistically in Milwaukee for a national convention that will formally make Trump their nominee, Lee’s party has been plagued by doubts about whether its standard-bearer is too old to campaign effectively.
Lee herself has been comparatively quiet on the matter, saying little beyond the observation that if Biden were to step down, Vice President and running mate Kamala Harris was the natural choice to replace him on the ticket. Asked Monday about whether the party should make such a move, Lee said that such a question “feels quite disingenuous” when it comes after the primary process has ended.
“The reality is that President Biden is our nominee until he is not,” she said.
She allowed that “the president has a tough task ahead of him,” in terms of rallying Democrats and convincing voters to give him a second term.
“I've heard from constituents who have watched the debate, and they had very real concerns about not just what they saw but what it may mean for our chances in November, what it may mean for the governance of our nation at an inflection point in global affairs.”
Then again, she added, “I've heard from other constituents who have concerns that change at this time is maybe close to unprecedented, that it may not work.”
But the unifying thread among those voters, she said, was the need to defeat Trump. And Biden “is our the most important person to make that case, but he's not the only person who has to make that case right now. … Everybody is going to have to play a role.
“Whoever it is that's going to be on the ballot in November, we know that Donald Trump's got to be on the ballot,” she added. “And I'll be out there to make sure that he does not get into the White House.”
