Where The Trump Attack Fits Into A Global Pattern Of Hate Speech And Violence

–Op-Ed–

ROME — It is striking how perfectly attuned the global ultra-right is in pointing to the attack on Donald Trump as the outcome of the left’s hatred rhetoric. Italy’s former interior minister Matteo Salvini denounced the “violent tones against opponents that risk arming the weak-minded.” The head of far-right Vox party in Spain, Santiago Abascal, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina’s current president Javier Milei, France’s Marine Le Pen — and even tech billionaire Elon Musk — all have essentially the same message.

In America’s darkest hour, leaders of all the nationalist-populist movements are drawing the sword of a new culture war. They also happen to include Moscow’s Iron Lady and Putin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who calls on the U.S. to make an “inventory” of its “policies of incitement to hatred against political opponents, countries and peoples.” In her mind, of course, that includes U.S. vocal support of Ukraine.

What a suggestive idea: making an inventory. And if you make an inventory of the ugliness that has befallen the friends of Trump’s MAGA world, you can almost convince yourself that yes, it’s true: all kinds of things have been said against those opponents — “the right-wingers, the fascists, the racists,” as Salvini would say — and now that the rifle of Thomas Matthew Crooks has spoken, a deeper reflection indeed is due.

Where did hate speech start?

Yet that inventory should begin with those who have also intellectually cleared hate as a legitimate feeling and even an inalienable prerogative of the person.

Here in Italy, it’s lately been the leading candidate of the populist world, Roberto Vannacci, the former army general who is now a member of the European Parliament, who campaigned on the existence of a specific right to hatred and elaborated a thesis on self-defense that goes a long way: “If I plunge the pencil I have in my breast pocket into the jugular of the jerk who attacks me, killing him, why should I risk being convicted?”

What if I perceive that jerk — perhaps a presidential candidate — as a threat to my entire world? What if I imagine his murder as an extreme act of self-defense on behalf of my nation?

Right-wing hatred

Yes, the inventory leads far and in a direction perhaps unwelcome to a populist international movement that has made its fortune pointing at real and imagined enemies — immigrants, social minorities, emancipated women, vaccine scientists, and so on.

A pickup truck is seen running with an image of Joe Biden with his hands and feet tied.

It is a front that has been fighting for two decades to restore hate speech and the the lexicon of homophobic or racist contempt with their implicit charge of violence — all in the name of freedom.

In the U.S. section of the inventory, we could add one of the most successful videos posted by Trump on Truth Social: a pickup truck is seen running with an image of Joe Biden with his hands and feet tied, like a war prisoner. Or the Christmas speech a couple of years ago in which Donald wished his opponents to rot in hell.

Hate affects all

Then, of course, hatred is not a specific party’s political prerogative. It is a liquid feeling, it seeps out.

Of course right-wing leaders have also been victims of it — the left isn’t shy about producing upside-down photomontages of current opponents that recall the gruesome images of Mussolini’s corpse hung in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto after he was executed by Italian partisans in 1945), or the threats and bullets that force so many to have a police escort.

But it is also true that many, while denouncing it, tend to make it a badge of honor, the central element of their election campaigns, like Bolsonaro declaring in Brazil “the victories of the people against an entire establishment that foments hatred.”

And even now, after Saturday’s shooting in Pennsylvania, the word “hate” is already the epicenter of a simplified narrative about the good guys and the bad guys, the champions of decent people and the perfidious oligarchies that put them in the crosshairs of a gun.

Hate as a battle cry

This rhetoric will succeed.

Our societies have obliterated the value of what the late Italian journalist and activist Alex Langer called “mediators, bridge-builders, wall-jumpers, frontier explorers”: people who reject the logic of the tribe and the construction of ancestral enemies on which to project frustration and fear.

Hate is a word used as an element of identity pride

Hate, which in the classical world was a pathology of conflict, is now a word thrown into the wind: it is used as a facilitator of consensus, as a hammer against opponents, as an element of identity pride (“they hate us so we are in the right”), as a calculation, or even as a battle cry.

“Fight!” shouted Donald Trump in the iconic photo of the moment after the attack, which is already on MAGA World T-shirts. It is certainly an image that will go down in history as evidence of pride and tenacity.

But let us also hope that no one takes it literally, as a call to respond to hate with hate, to weapons with weapons.