The Utah senator Mike Lee sounded like a lot of other Republican politicians after the fatal shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota this weekend.
“These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families,” he wrote on Twitter/X.
That was from his official account. On his personal X account, he posted a series of memes concerning the attacks that left former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark dead, and state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette seriously injured.
“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee posted, along with a photo of the alleged gunman, who was arrested on Sunday. He followed that up by posting the photo and writing “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, an apparent misspelling of Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic governor who became nationally known last year as Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Such was the split screen that played out among Republicans after the Saturday morning shootings, which were the latest in a wave of political violence across the United States that has most recently seen two assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump as he campaigned for president, a flamethrower attack on a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado and a slew of threats targeting judges who have ruled against the US president.
While many in the GOP condemned the attacks in Minnesota, others have used it as an opportunity to poke fun at their Democratic opponents, or suggest that they somehow instigated the violence. Experts warn it may be the latter statements that reach the bigger audience.
“I think there’s no question that these messages are representative of the modern GOP more so than any stock thoughts and prayers tweet that a staffer puts up,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
Democrats have been unequivocal in condemning the shootings, as have Congress’s top Republicans. “Such horrific political violence has no place in our society, and every leader must unequivocally condemn it,” said House speaker, Mike Johnson. Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he was “horrified at the events unfolding in Minnesota” and that “political violence has no place in our nation”.
Minnesota’s Republican party condemned the shooting, as did the state’s entire congressional delegation.
But when it comes to Trump and his most vociferous allies on social media, the message is more mixed. Trump initially condemned the attacks, saying on Saturday: “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!”
But the following day, he struck a different tone, telling ABC News that the shooting was “a terrible thing” but calling Walz “a terrible governor” and “a grossly incompetent person”. “I may call him, I may call other people too,” he added. On Monday afternoon, Walz’s office said Trump had not called.
Meanwhile, on X, prominent rightwing figures were quick to promote conspiracy theories about what happened. Elon Musk, the erstwhile Trump sidekick who runs Tesla, shared a tweet from a pro-Trump account that read, in part: “The left has become a full blown domestic terrorist organization.”
“The far left is murderously violent” Musk wrote in his reply, which Lee shared, adding: “Fact check: TRUE”.
Laura Loomer, the rightwing extremist who is said to have played a role in encouraging Trump to fire national security officials, alleged the suspect had ties to the “No Kings” protests that took place nationwide on Saturday, and that Walz knew him.
The spread of outlandish falsehoods and conspiracy theories on social media has been a hallmark of the atmosphere Trump has brought to US politics over the past decade, and Lewis believes the country is now at a point where such fabrications have more prominence than politicians’ carefully written statements.
“The real problem now is that nothing matters, and I think that has been realized by the mainstream right in this country. There are no consequences for peddling disinformation or conspiracies,” he said.
Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, said that the United States had entered an era of “violent populism”, and if Democrats and Republicans want to stop it, they need to issue joint statements speaking out against atrocities like what happened in Minnesota.
“You’ve got to start having some agreement here on negotiating these rules of the road, so to speak, because if each side continues to simply only accept unconditional surrender by the other, well, then just like in Ukraine, you’re not going to end this thing very, very soon, and things will just escalate,” Pape said.
