OPINION: Why can’t we tone down the rhetoric in the U.S.?

This editorial was published in the Post Register of Idaho Falls.

It was July 13 when the first assassination attempt on Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump occurred in Pennsylvania.

The next day, President Joe Biden gave a prime-time national address from the Oval Office, warning of the risks of political violence in the U.S. and saying, “It’s time to cool it down.”

Biden said political passions can run high but “we must never descend into violence.”

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence — for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

That didn’t last long. We are at a new normal, and have been for a while.

Here we are now, just over two months later and almost three weeks removed from a second apparent assassination attempt happening at Trump International Golf Club in Florida.

We’re not going to say that there isn’t heated rhetoric on each side. It must be recognized that each side of the political spectrum has its share of hotheads capable of trying to take out a major political figure. That’s where the heat of the rhetoric becomes so dangerous.

Why can’t we seem to cool it down?

After Biden’s Oval Office address in July, Trump himself posted on his social media account, “UNITE AMERICA!” But this election cycle has only shown that we are far from united.

It’s been weeks since we posted a story on our website under the headline, “Trump threatens to jail adversaries in escalating rhetoric ahead of pivotal debate.”

What came out of that pivotal debate? More rhetoric, the most attention-grabbing rhetoric aimed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for “eating the cats ... eating the dogs ... eating the pets of the people who live there.”

By that time, there was already some quiet buzz going around about that claim, enough for a moderator to do some real time fact checking, saying that there were no reports of that happening. The moderator was blasted on one side for doing that.

How did that rhetoric get started? There were claims that it was on television, there was video, etc. No one making the claim has bothered to produce the video to back it up, though.

Outlets such as the Wall Street Journal have reported that the pet-eating claims started with a police report from one resident in Springfield that alleged her cat may have been stolen by her Haitian neighbors. Later on it turned out that the missing cat was found in that resident’s basement, safe and sound. The resident reportedly issued an apology to her Haitian neighbors through a translation app.

It was all to feed the rhetoric surrounding the immigration issue. And how did that turn out? According to The Associated Press, Ohio stationed state police at Springfield schools in response to a rash of bomb threats, including a vast majority that officials said came from overseas.

Schools, government buildings and elected officials’ homes in Springfield were among the targets of more than 30 hoax threats made after the debate that forced evacuations and closures, the AP reported. Two more schools later had to be evacuated, and the high school also was threatened. Many parents opted to keep their children at home. At one elementary school, some 200 students were absent Sept. 17 out of a population of 500.

“There’s still a high level of fear due to these unfounded threats and hoaxes that have marred our existence really for going on a week now,” said Robert Hill, chief executive officer of the Springfield City School District, appearing at a news conference.

At least the cat who helped stir it all up, unbeknownst to her, was safe and sound, not eaten.

By the way, the cat’s name is Miss Sassy.

It’s all so silly. We talk about cooling the rhetoric, but we don’t — at least not for long. Meanwhile, there’ve been two assassination attempts on a former POTUS, and the whole “eating the cats” fiasco by itself led to thousands of lives being turned upside down.

It’s not just rhetoric we find at a national level. It’s all over the place. It’s in state capitals, it’s in county seats, it’s in our neighborhoods.

We all need to just cool it.