JD Vance blamed ‘fascist’ rhetoric for Trump shooting — but he said something similar

Shortly after a 20-year-old gunman attempted to kill former President Donald Trump on Saturday, many Republicans rushed to blame Democrats and the media for the shooting.

They include Ohio U.S. Senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. They also include Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia even posted on X that the district attorney of Butler County, Pennsylvania, where the shooting took place, should file criminal charges against President Joe Biden.

All came to a verdict in the hours after the shooting. Some did so even before the identity of the shooter was made public. But four days later, the shooter’s motives are still unknown and even the basic tenets of his political views remain vague.

But one fact seems clear. The two most prominent Ohio players in the post-shooting blame game have in the past compared Trump to the most damaging fascist of them all: Adolf Hitler.

Spokespeople for Vance and Moreno did not respond to requests for comment on statements the two made about Trump, who they first opposed and then supported.

On Saturday, just two hours after a 20-year-old criticized Trump, Vance took on X to blame Biden.

“Today is not an isolated incident,” he wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump.”

In February 2016, Vance texted a former Yale Law school classmate in which he made an even more pointed comparison about Trump.

Vance said he had “gone back and forth between the idea that Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who might not be so bad (and might even prove useful) or that he is America’s Hitler.”

Trump is under federal charge for trying to steal an election he lost, he has been called to “terminate” the Constitution over his loss, he has embraced political violence and police brutality — and he has called his political opponents “vermin.”

By repeatedly saying that immigrants “poison the blood of our country,” the former president was clearly rhyming with Hitler, who repeatedly used the same metaphor to attack Jews and any other “race” he considered inferior to “Aryans.” Regarding Jewish men who “allow” Jewish women to marry Christians, Hitler said, “He poisons the blood of others, but keeps his own blood pure.”

It seems that some of the rhetoric is coming from Trump’s own words and actions. It also seems that the rush to blame others for the shooting was actually an attempt to deter people from speaking publicly about Trump’s anti-democratic behavior.

But Moreno, the Republican challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), said the blame for last week’s shooting lies with the media and Democrats.

“They’ve been calling (Trump) Hitler for eight years,” Moreno said in a recording his campaign posted on X. “The shooter is 20 years old. From the time he was 12 years old, they’ve been telling him that (Trump) is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. If you could shoot Adolf Hitler in 1935, would you be a good person or a bad person? That’s how (the shooter) saw it. That’s their business. It’s their business, which is the Democrats, and the mainstream media as well.”

But on Moreno’s Twitter account in 2016, Moreno himself compared Trump to Hitler. In a now-deleted post, the future Senate candidate retweeted a poll featuring Trump and Hitler, adding a commentary.

“He attacked immigrants, tried to silence the press and appealed to the darkest part of human nature,” the statement said.

Moreno did not say which man he was referring to. But his use of the present tense is telling, given that Hitler had been dead for 70 years at the time.

Moreno’s spokeswoman was asked about examples of the press comparing Trump to Hitler over the past eight years. She was also asked if Moreno was concerned that blaming the press and political opponents for Trump’s attempted assassination would make them a target, given all the armed, volatile people out there.

She didn’t respond.

The Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. The Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. For questions, please contact Editor David Dewitt: [email protected]. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.