On Saturday night, mere hours after former U.S. President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. 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 President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Sunday, “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to Democracy’ wasn’t some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!!” CNN contributor and Republican political consultant Scott Jennings offered, “The rhetoric around him over the last few weeks, that if he wins an election our country will end, our democracy will end, it’s the last election we’ll ever have. These things have consequences.”

These tweets and statements were an irresponsible rush to judgment as the story was still developing. (For example, it emerged on Sunday that the shooter is a registered Republican.) But worse than that, in making these comments, Vance and company were encouraging the very thing that they’re pretending to criticize: division and targeting of political enemies. What’s more, the comments are an attempt to use political violence to chill criticism of a political ideology that has itself inspired or been connected to violence.

Similar tactics have been used very recently elsewhere in the world: Earlier this year, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was also the target of assassination attempt.

Fico had recently been elected back into office; in 2018, he resigned after the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. And in his campaign to return to power last year, Fico attacked the media. (He had previously, famously called journalists “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.”) He smeared........

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