Washington leaders agree harmful political rhetoric must end

SEATTLE — Washington leaders across political ideologies agree that the violent and hateful rhetoric in the nation’s politics has been building for years. Reversing course, however, they acknowledge will take more work from everyone.

In the hours after the attack, nearly all politicians decried the attempted assassination of former President Trump with similar iterations—that violence, especially political violence, has no place in American Politics.

The violence though, a reflection of the vitriol in the political sphere, according to President Joe Biden, who called for a cooling of the temperature in how Americans, and their elected leaders, speak to each other when they disagree.

For Washington Congressman Adam Smith, a Democrat, sees this moment 13 years in the making when his friend and former Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot at a town hall event. Six people were killed in that mass shooting, and 19 others were injured in what at the time was one of the deadliest political attacks on American soil.

“I think it’s fair to say it speaks to a broader cultural problem,” Smith said.

The mass shooting came at the heels of a campaign where Gifford’s offices were targeted with vandalism.

Six years later, in 2017, Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional softball game, the shooter reportedly asked which party was practicing on the field.

In his Sunday address, President Biden recalled the 2020 kidnapping plot that was foiled against Democratic Governor Gretchen Witmer in Michigan, the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S Capitol, and the attack in 2022 of Former Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

For Christine Charters, she said she felt the vitriol when she canvased for the Former President in King County. She had to cancel events in the past for her group, King County Patriots.

“When we were doing meet-ups in Seattle, we had to take it private because weird people showed up,” Charters said.

Charters, who blamed nationally-focused media and politics, said “each side tries to get these sound bytes and hit them again and again and again and they get more notice if it’s something extreme.”

Snohomish County GOP Chair Bill Cooper says comments by celebrities leading up to the attack, like Lea DeLaria calling for Trump’s assassination two weeks ago, as reasons why he didn’t find this weekend’s attack surprising.

“The last eight or nine years have been a clear unabated attack on Donald Trump,” said Cooper.

For Smith, he points out the Former President’s mocking of the attack on Pelosi’s husband and the conspiracy theories that rang out afterward as an example of the inflamed political rhetoric—and potentially the normalization of it.

“We all condemn the attack on Donald Trump,” Smith said, “We all universally condemn the baseball attack. No hesitation, no conspiracies, this is wrong. I just wish Republicans would be as unequivocal when attacks on Democrats come.”

When asked, Cooper acknowledged Trump’s words saying “President Trump is a strong personality and things being said like that on either side are unwarranted.”

“I think all political leaders have a role to play in lowering the political temperature.” Charters said.

Sen. J.D Vance, an Ohio Republican who became the GOP’s vice presidential nominee on Monday, targeted Democrats Saturday for the attack on President Trump. In a tweet he said Democrats calling Trump an “authoritarian fascist” “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Rep. Smith dismisses and disagrees with Vance’s assessment. In his eyes, politics calls for differentiating candidates and issues in sometimes strong terms. What crosses the line, is when those calls include violent and hateful language.

“What if we were to say, ‘If Donald Trump gets back in the White House, it might be the end of our Democracy,’ I’m not going to tell people not to say that because January 6th happened, that’s what January 6th was, it was a violent attempt to overturn an election,” Smith said.

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