After assault on Ilhan Omar, Trump responds with another blame-the-victim conspiracy theory

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump did it after the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He did it after the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He did it after the murder last month of filmmaker and Democratic activist Rob Reiner. And he did it again on Tuesday after an attack on another Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

After cases of violence targeted at his political opponents, Trump has shown a penchant to respond with conspiracy theories baselessly suggesting the targets of that violence are at fault. When he was asked by an ABC News reporter on Tuesday night whether he had seen the video of Omar being sprayed with a substance by a man at her town hall event, Trump responded, “No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

Such false-flag conspiracy theories were already spreading Tuesday night in pro-Trump circles on social media. As usual, there was no apparent basis for them.

The man who was arrested, Anthony Kazmierczak, had previously shared anti-Omar content and photos of Trump on social media. He texted his neighbor that he might get arrested at Omar’s town hall, then rushed the podium and sprayed her with a substance police believe was apple cider vinegar. Kazmierczak was arrested by Minneapolis police in connection with alleged third-degree assault, and a federal law enforcement official told CNN’s Holmes Lybrand on Wednesday that US Capitol Police were pursuing potential federal charges.

The Capitol Police said in a Wednesday statement: “A man is in custody after he decided to assault a Member of Congress – an unacceptable decision that will be met with swift justice. We are grateful for the rapid response from onsite security and our local law enforcement partners. We are now working with our federal partners to see this man faces the most serious charges possible to deter this kind of violence in our society.”

In the past, Trump has been undeterred by official confirmation that his conspiratorial accusations were inaccurate. His comments are part of a long series of unsympathetic responses to incidents affecting people not aligned with him politically.

The murder of Rob and Michele Reiner: When director, actor and Democratic activist Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in December, police arrested their son Nick Reiner, who had a history of addiction and mental health issues, later the same day. But the next morning, Trump wrote a social media post in which he baselessly said Reiner had died “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” This might well have been an act of trolling rather than a serious claim, but Trump was at least on the surface blaming Reiner for his own killing.

The attack on Paul Pelosi: After a man seeking to kidnap Nancy Pelosi broke into her home in 2022 and hit her husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer, the FBI said in a court filing that the assailant, David DePape, had admitted to smashing a door to get in. But Trump went on to wrongly claim the glass was broken from the inside of the home, “so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break-out,” and joined other Republican figures in hinting suggestively that something in the Pelosis’ personal life was responsible for the unprovoked attack. DePape, who had subscribed to various right-wing conspiracy theories, was later convicted by state and federal juries and sentenced to life in prison.

The attack on the US Capitol: In the five years after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump has cast baseless blame on a variety of people who were targeted by the violence that day.

Trump has repeatedly claimed the riot was caused by Nancy Pelosi, though there are no grounds for that claim and though rioters were seen on video angrily trying to find her; a Pelosi spokesperson told CNN in 2024 that “as numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed, Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination.” Trump has also explicitly said that “in many ways, you can blame” his former vice president, Mike Pence, “for January 6th” – though Pence, who was forced to flee from rioters that day, merely did his legal duty to preside over the tallying of the electoral votes and did not have the power to thwart the defeat of the Trump-Pence 2020 ticket.

This month, five years after the insurrection, Trump’s White House added another target to the victim-blaming – posting a web page casting aspersions on the police officers who were trying to defend lawmakers and the building in the face of waves of assaults.

The kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: This Trump comment was vaguer than the others. But after the FBI thwarted a 2020 plot to kidnap Whitmer, Trump said at a campaign rally, “I mean, we’ll have to see if it’s a problem. Right? People are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.” He did not explain why a violent plot against a governor wouldn’t have been a “problem”; multiple perpetrators were subsequently convicted and sentenced to years in prison.

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