Donald Trump is apparently now saying that the attempted assassinations directed at him occurred because Democrats have labeled him a threat to democracy, and that Democrats should tone down their rhetoric.

Given what Trump has done and said already, his own words and actions demonstrate that he is a threat to democracy. The Democrats didn’t incite the January 6th attempted coup. Trump’s lies and acts did. Then he compounded those acts by failing to call off his supporters for hours, and when he did, he said he loved those who created the uprising.

In the meantime, just in the last week, Trump and Vance’s bald-faced and totally refuted lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have spurred bomb threats, as well as forced the closure of two colleges and several schools, and created wide-spread and still on-going disruption for the entire town. Yet Vance went on to say that he’d continue to lie if those lies brought issues to public attention

Trump doesn’t give a damn about what happens to others so long as he gets his way. He incited the January 6th insurgency, but walked away from the situation and the ensuing carnage that not only injured 140 police, but hundreds of his own followers. That kind of single-minded narcissism is more like Hamas than traditional U.S. Republican behavior.

And that behavior identifies Vance and Trump as threats to democracy.

One of the great weaknesses of democracies is that they too often fail to restrict the unchecked flow of falsehoods from demagogues and would-be dictators, largely because restricting speech on any grounds is the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to tyranny. The problem, unfortunately, is that not restricting blatantly false assertions can also bring down democratic government – and has done so time and time again, because those who lie blatantly and repeatedly to gain power won’t stop there.

And people who will willingly accept lie after lie because those lies reinforce their beliefs deserve the hell that will ensue if those fallacy-followers become the majority. Unhappily, the rest of us will suffer the same fate, if not worse, given what “true believers” usually do to non-believers.