The Trump shooting has led to a political blame game. If we keep playing, we are doomed

On Jan. 30, 1948, after news spread that Mahatma Gandhi had been shot, the last colonial governor of India heard a man shout, “It was a Muslim who did it.”

Governor-General Louis Mountbatten replied, “You fool, don’t you know it was a Hindu?” An aide asked Mountbatten how he knew that. “I don’t,” Mountbatten admitted, “but if it really was a Muslim, India is going to live through one of the ghastliest massacres the world has ever seen.”

I thought of this story as soon as I heard about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday in Butler, Pa. And I hoped to God that the shooter came from Trump’s own party.

He did. Allegheny County resident Thomas Matthew Crooks was a registered Republican, just as Gandhi’s murderer was a Hindu. Imagine what might have ensued if the person who shot Trump was a Democrat. Or a Black Lives Matter activist. Or an undocumented immigrant.

Millions of Americans now believe that their political opponents are forces of evil, bent on destroying the nation — and you can’t sustain a nation on those terms.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said as much in his remarks on Sunday, following the attempt on Trump’s life. “Everyone needs to turn the rhetoric down,” Johnson pleaded. “We’re all Americans, and we have to treat one another with dignity and respect.”

Johnson went on to condemn President Joe Biden for saying Democrats should “put Trump in the bulls-eye” in their appeals to voters. “That kind of language on either side should be called out,” Johnson said.

But Johnson never called out the language of Donald Trump, who has employed more violent rhetoric than any other modern American politician.

We’re talking about a man who urged supporters to “knock the crap” out of anti-Trump protesters, promising to pay any resulting legal bills.

He praised a Montana congressman who body-slammed a reporter. He called for looters and shoplifters to be shot. And he mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband after an assailant beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Unfortunately, some of my fellow Democrats have mimicked Trump’s bullying style. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders was his press secretary, a Virginia restaurant asked her to leave because she worked for him. Demonstrators gathered outside the house of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, where they blasted audio of crying migrant children who had been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These protesters got a shout-out from Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), who urged Democrats to keep stalking Trump administration officials. “They’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store,” Waters warned.

Does this mean that Democratic protesters were to blame when an armed man later appeared outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with the apparent intent to kill him? Of course not. But surely they helped normalize the idea of harassing political officials when you don’t like their politics.

To their credit, Democratic leaders condemned Waters and other protesters for their uncivil behavior. But most Republicans have failed to denounce the incendiary language of Donald Trump, who will be coronated as their presidential candidate at the GOP convention in Milwaukee this week.

Instead, after the attack on Trump, GOP leaders blamed Democrats for it. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio) wrote on X on Saturday. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

The next day, Trump announced that he would revise his planned acceptance speech — which had been “extremely tough” on Democrats — to emphasize shared American values. “I want to try to unite our country,” Trump said. “But I don’t know if it’s possible. People are very divided.”

And the day after that, Trump selected Vance as his running mate. It certainly won’t be possible to unite the country if the GOP says Democrats are responsible for Saturday’s attack. That’s a formula for yet more division, rancor, and hate.

We still don’t know what motivated Crooks, whom a former high school classmate described as a staunch conservative. But here’s what we do know: The blame game will get us nowhere. If we continue to denounce each other as cancers on the body politic, we are doomed.

If we continue to denounce each other as cancers on the body politic, we are doomed.

That brings us back to Mahatma Gandhi, who imagined India as a multi-religious democracy. His murderer, Nathuram Godse, wanted it to be a Hindu nation. Astonishingly, amid a new surge of religious extremism in India, growing numbers of Hindus are celebrating Godse as a patriot.

But the real patriots are the people who bring us together, instead of pulling us apart. Our red and blue political identities have come to resemble sectarian religions, which could erupt in violence at any time. Perhaps we can use this terrible moment to catch our breath, turn the rhetoric down, and treat each other with dignity and respect. Imagine that.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.