Violence begets violence, the old saying goes, and America is likely to suffer more of it unless we shift course in how we talk and act about our politics.

I don't know why a 20-year-old man with an AR-15-style rifle tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a rally in western Pennsylvania on Saturday evening in a volley of gunfire that left the gunman and one audience member dead and two injured.

But this, I know – violent rhetoric has been rising again in American politics in the past decade, and Trump's MAGA movement has been a driving force in that. The response to Saturday's tragedy from some of MAGA's supporters in the Republican Party has been an all-out embrace of the kind of rhetoric that prompts violence.

At a time when we should be stepping back to look at how we got here, so many are pushing forward with more of the same. Some actually celebrated the violence as an election game-changer – as if this were a game – while others reached to paint President Joe Biden as an agent provocateur for the way he talks about Trump.

Madness begets madness in American politics, and it looks like we're in for more of it.

Consider Chris LaCivita, Trump's campaign senior adviser, who immediately tried to shift blame to Biden in this social media post Saturday: "For years, and even today, leftist activists, (Democratic) donors and now even Joe Biden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump. It's high time they be held accountable for it (and) the best way is through the ballot........

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