Within hours of former US President Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt by mere millimeters, his Republican supporters in Congress claimed they knew exactly who was responsible: current President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Senator J.D. Vance, who is on Trump’s shortlist for vice president, said Biden’s “campaign rhetoric led directly” to the shooting attack on Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday.

The former US leader was wounded in the ear, one man in the audience was killed, and two other rally attendees were critically wounded.

The shooter, 20-year-old Matthew Crooks, who used an AR-15 rifle to take shots at Trump while perched on a roof, was killed by counter-sniper fire.

Vance’s comment was one of an escalating chorus by Republicans who have pinned the blame on the Democrats — even as the FBI said it had yet to determine the shooter’s motive.

The Republicans also heaped more fuel on the fire in a political atmosphere that has long been tense and fiercely polarized.

“Heated rhetoric has come from both sides” in recent years, Michael Bailey, a political science professor at Georgetown University, told AFP.

Republicans, for whom gun rights and a rejection of government overreach are key themes, “have been more prone to marry such rhetoric with imagery related to guns,” Bailey noted.

“And some of them (including Trump) did not cover themselves in glory when they made light of the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband,” he said, referring to the 2022 attack by a conspiracy theorist on the high-profile Democrat’s spouse.

Trump later mocked the Pelosis and stoked further conspiracy theories around the assault.

Biden ‘sent the orders’

Steve Scalise, a Republican who was shot in a 2017 attack by a left-wing activist, also blamed the left for Saturday’s assassination attempt.

“Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America,” he said.

“For years, and even today, leftist activists, Democrat donors and now even Joe Biden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita charged on X.

Biden did recently tell donors that it was “time to put Trump in the bullseye,” in comments put out by his campaign — though he was speaking in the context of focusing the party on beating Trump.

Representative Mike Collins went further on the shooting, stating that “Joe Biden sent the orders,” without offering credible evidence.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, contributed an escalation of her own, telling her followers “we are in a battle between good and evil,” and casting Democrats as “the party of pedophiles” and “violence.”

“The Democrat Party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump,” she said.

‘America needs to stop’

Such accusations risk taking “attention from the very welcome, widespread condemnation of the attack,” said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The heated rhetoric pushed Biden to issue a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday in which he called on Americans to “lower the temperature.”

Biden and Trump spoke to each other after the incident, while Biden’s campaign is temporarily pausing television ads — which some on both sides hope will be part of a broader national cooling off period.

“Tensions are high on both sides, and I think we’ve got to tone down the rhetoric,” 60-year-old Trump supporter Martin Kutzler told AFP in downtown Milwaukee, where the Republican convention is set to open Monday.

Republican National Committee chair Michael Whately, meanwhile, declined to speculate on the shooting while speaking to Fox News Sunday.

“Right now, I think everybody in America needs to stop. They need to pause,” he said.

Among many other officials, though, the accusations kept coming.

“When the message goes out constantly, that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy, and the republic would end, it heats up the environment,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Depoliticizing the shooting, however, is essential, Georgetown’s Bailey said. “In an environment with so many guns... it is possible for heated rhetoric to motivate an unbalanced person on any side.”