Rudy Giuliani outside the site of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones
Rudy Giuliani has a message for Democrats: Their rhetoric, especially President Joe Biden’s, has been “an invitation of violence.”
Democrats “get away with murder because there’s a two-tier system of justice,” Giuliani told me outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday afternoon. “They can do the worst things in the world—nobody pays attention. We can make little mistakes, and they become world class.”
This is, of course, the same Rudy Giuliani who spoke to MAGA supporters ahead of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, calling for “trial by combat.”
It’s also the same Giuliani who falsely accused a temporary election official in Fulton, Georgia of manipulating ballots in the 2020 election—a claim that Trump echoed when he said that worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “vote scammer” in his infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger alleging widespread fraud. Based on these allegations, a mob of election-integrity skeptics also appeared at Freeman’s house on January 6, 2021; luckily the FBI was able to warn her that her safety was at risk, allowing her to flee in time. (Giuliani was found liable for defamation and was ordered to pay Freeman and her daughter $148 million in damages in 2023. In separate court proceedings, Giuliani was disbarred by a New York state appeals court in July).
But a few days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Giuliani appears to have memory-holed the part he and other Republicans played in promoting the 2020 election denialism that culminated in the violence on January 6, including the resulting casualties of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and Trump devotee Ashli Babbitt. Giuliani’s argument that left-wing messaging—such as accusing Trump of being a danger to Democracy or a fascist—led to Trump being shot at on July 13 was widely held among the half a dozen politicians and other Republican convention-goers I spoke to.
Waverly Woods, an RNC attendee from Virginia Beach, joked that Biden may as well have pulled the trigger himself. “You can’t kill your opponent because he’s winning,” she says. “Apparently you can search his house and his wife’s underwear, and you can spy on his campaign, but I think killing him might be going a little too far.”
Several interviewees pointed out Biden’s comment in a call to donors a few days before the rally shooting, when he said it was time to “put Trump in the bullseye,” as a prime example of Democrats inciting violence. (“That was pretty bad,” according to Giuliani.) But several convention attendees contended that Democrats have been stoking violence with their rhetoric for years.
“The guy that shot up a [baseball] field in Washington, DC—that was very rhetoric driven,” Alabama convention attendee Bryan Dawson says of the 2017 shooting that severely insured then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise at a Republican baseball practice session. Regarding the shooting at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Dawson says it was either “a coup at the highest levels, and they were letting him be on the roof to shoot Donald Trump, or it was rhetoric driven—because those are the only two options.”
“Anytime there’s political violence, it’s only going one direction. Anytime there’s cities being burned, it’s one group of people doing it. You never see people with a hat like this out doing anything violent,” adds Dawson, pointing to his red Make America Great Again hat. “We might say say some things or whatever, but it’s nowhere near the rhetoric or the constant propaganda that’s coming from the left.”
Perhaps Dawson forgot about January 6 attack; or about the rally in Ohio this past spring when Trump warned of a “bloodbath” if he loses in November; or about Trump’s answer to a TIME Magazine question about whether he expected violence after the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” Trump said.
Meanwhile, prominent Republicans hold that Trump—who shouted “fight” after he was shot at, and once advocated for shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down along the southern border—is trying to teach Democrats goodwill through his example.
“I think you’ve seen what President Trump has done right now: he hasn’t blamed anybody,” Kevin McCarthy, former Republican Speaker of the House, told Mother Jones Monday. “He’s actually putting a whole new speech together, talking about uniting the nation. I think that’s a very positive step.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate who later endorsed Trump, says Biden is sowing division by fear-mongering about Trump.
“I’ll take [Biden] at his word that he wants to unite the country and tone down the political rhetoric,” Ramaswamy says. “But his entire campaign message has centered around how Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. And so either [Biden] is doubling down on something that he himself has said is the wrong direction to go, or he doesn’t have a campaign message left.”
“I think that there’s a strong case, to blame the media, to blame the Democrat machine,” adds Ramaswamy. “But I’m not focused on doing that. I would like for us to take the road less traveled, which is to focus on who we are and what we stand for. And I think those are ideals that unite all Americans. And I think the best way we’re going to save this country isn’t by calling on the other stand other side to play by different standards, but to hold ourselves to the standards we expect to hold the country.”
A couple hours after these interviews, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin took the stage at the convention and said Democrats were a threat to the country. In a speech he later said was added to the RNC teleprompter by mistake, Johnson described the Democratic Party’s policies as a “clear and present danger to America” and that Democrats were the party of “weaponized government.”