Tommy Vietor

You guys think that attack will fly?

They're all doing this today.

It could be funded right now.

People could be getting paid right now.

That's it.

It's absurd.

Yeah, that's where we should have started.

Let's talk about that.

Once it became clear from the shooter's manifesto and social media presence that he was motivated by opposition to Trump, the focus of the right-wing reaction moved from the ballroom to the rhetoric on the left.

Ballroom, actually, it's kind of died down now, right?

We've moved past the ballroom now.

Now we're big into the rhetoric on the left.

The ballroom blitz is over.

Yeah, just to give you a flavor of how understated the criticism has been, Senator Rick Scott of Florida said, quote, Democrats want President Trump and Republicans murdered all across this country.

Just normal.

The latest round of this discourse reached its inevitable climax on Monday morning when Melania Trump.

tweeted out a condemnation of, quote, hateful and violent rhetoric from Jimmy Kimmel, apparently a reference to a joke made last Thursday night, days before the dinner, where Kimmel delivered a mock address to an imagined correspondence dinner.

Here's what the joke, which no one had been talking about until after the dinner, sounded like in context.

So shortly after Melania posted, her husband jumped in, referring to the sketch as a, quote, call to violence.

That was pretty clear.