WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence has rejected suggestions that the inflammatory rhetoric from President Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party has contributed to the rise of political violence, arguing that members of both parties engage in heated debate.
Pence made the remarks in an interview with NBC News after Saturday’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, in which 11 people were killed and six wounded. The incident was the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.
Several other Trump administration officials and lawmakers weighed in on the shooting in appearances on the Sunday morning news shows.
In the interview with NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, Pence denounced the shooting and said that the country has “no tolerance for the kind of anti-Semitic violence that reared its ugly head today.” But he also defended the often-explosive language used by Trump, maintaining that the president “connected to the American people because he spoke plainly.”
“Everyone has their own style,” Pence said in the interview, which aired Saturday. “And frankly, people on both sides of the aisle use strong language about our political differences. But I just don’t think you can connect it to threats or acts of violence, Vaughn. And I don’t think the American people connect it.”
In the wake of the shooting and last week’s string of mail bombs allegedly sent by a Trump supporter targeting high-profile critics of the president, some have called for Trump to tone down his rhetoric.
Pence rebuffed those calls, contending that “debate is healthy in America.”
“We want a free and open political debate in America where everyone expresses themselves passionately and openly — but also recognize the difference between passionate debate and acts of violence and evil,” Pence said.
Reaction on the Sunday shows to the shooting split largely along partisan lines.
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen called the shooting “a pure act of evil.”
“You’ve heard that from the president and vice president yesterday; that’s what it is,” she said. “We all condemn this in the strongest terms possible.”
Nielsen said her agency had conducted a site visit at the synagogue as recently as March, with a protective security adviser — a step officials often take, she said.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the motivation of the alleged killer, 46-year-old Robert D. Bowers, “certainly looks … pretty clear.”
Bowers appears to have railed against Jewish people and refugees online.
Schiff also raised the issue of the country’s current political climate, asking, “What kind of climate are we creating?”
“No one sets the tone more than the president of the United States … There’s no escaping the tone that he sets,” Schiff said.
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