During Christmas 1170, King Henry II of England, fed up with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, declared, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four knights traveled the 258 miles from Normandy, France, to Canterbury and killed Beckett.

On Dec. 14, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., drove 358 miles to Washington, D.C., and opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle at the Comet Ping Pong restaurant after reading on the internet that the pizzeria housed a Satanic child abuse cult run by top Democrats.

More recently, then President Donald Trump called on his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C., for a “Save America March” on Jan.6, 2021, to “be there, will be wild.” Tens of thousands showed up and he stoked their fury as Congress assembled to verify the election result favoring Joe Biden.

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” he told them, adding, “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. … We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The crowd turned into an angry mob that violently stormed the Capitol, resulting in several deaths and the subsequent arrest of more than 1,200 with nearly 900 found guilty of federal crimes so far.

Indeed, words have consequences especially in times of political tension and that reality has entered the current presidential campaign in a startling manner. On July 13, a gunman fired several shots at Trump during a rally at Butler, Pa., but only nicked his ear, while killing a rally-goer and wounding two others before a Secret Service agent shot him.

On Sunday, the Secret Service appears to have foiled a possible second assassination attempt as Trump played golf at his Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach. An agent saw the supposed would-be shooter’s gun barrel poking through a fence and fired a shot at him. He ran off but was quickly caught in a getaway car.

However, at the time of writing, federal authorities investigating the two incidents have not linked them directly to any remarks from Trump’s opponents. There has so far been no report of a political motive in the Butler shooting and the Mar-a-Lago would-be shooter has a confusion history except for supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion.

Still, those incidents should have been seen as a clear call for more restraint in campaign rhetoric from the Democrats and the Republicans. And, after Butler, Trump told The Washington Examiner that he had a chance “to bring the country and the world together,” CNN reported.

But the prospect of a détente did not last long. Similarly, following the Mar-a-Lago incident, Trump accepted phone calls from his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden, who declared that there is no place for violence in the campaign or elsewhere.

Trump was gracious about the calls when he spoke at a rally in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday, saying, “It was very nice and we appreciate that.” He said Biden “was no nice to me yesterday. In one way I sort of wish the call hadn’t been made, because I do feel he’s so, so nice.” As to Harris, “She could not have been nicer.” But then he added, that “we have to take back our country and we have to win. And we’re going to make America great again,” HuffPost reported.

Trump later told Fox News Digital, without any proof, that the Mar-a-Lago suspect “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris and he acted on it. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are trying to destroy the country – both from inside and out. It’s called the enemy from within.”

The Democrats’ rhetoric has not been flawless. CNN’s Stephen Collinson, in analysis on Tuesday, noted that New York Rep. Daniel Goldman had said last year that Trump should be “eliminated.” But, Collinson added, Goldman had apologized for his “poor choice of words.” Harris herself has said that Trump is such a big threat to democracy that “it’s up to the American people to stop him.” But, Collinson said, she “was clearly speaking in a political context.”

Collinson added that “if Democratics are to blame for sometimes going over the top, Trump has made a political brand of the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by a president or ex-president in the modern history of the United States. The scale and intensity of his invective dwarf anything that the Democrats have flung at him.” As recently as Monday, Trump wrote in a social media post, “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala during the rigged and highly artisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Elon Musk, who recently endorsed Trump, posted on X, formerly Twitter, which he owns, that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” He said it had been a joke but deleted it.

Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, added his own take: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Harris in the last couple of months and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”

Then there is the lie of Haitians eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, which Trump, Vance and Musk are spreading to shore up their main campaign platform plank: illegal immigration.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs – the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country and it’s a shame,” Trump said in his recent debate with Harris on ABC News.

Vance, who, as Ohio’s senator, could have quickly found out that the claim is false – as the mayor and the governor have stated – but he chose to spread it. After CNN’s Dana Bash called him out on “a story that you created.” Vance replied that he needed “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

That is not surprising for the running mate of the man who has built his political career on falsehoods and misstatements – a total of 30,573 during his presidency, according to The Washington Post.

As a consequence of the lie, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, reported that Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats and has been forced to close government offices, schools and businesses for the sake of safety. All because, according to Newsweek, a woman posted the falsehood on Facebook after hearing it from a neighbor who, NewsGuard reported, had gotten the information from someone else.

But who cares, right? Who cares that it was not Harris’ rhetoric that put Trump’s life in danger? He said so, and therefore it must be so. Who cares that Trump’s rhetoric can definitely motivate some supporter to retaliate against the vice president?

All Americans should care. In the United States, power does not come from the barrel of a gun.