Top Florida Republicans are denouncing Stetson University for publishing a newsletter that said former President Donald Trump poses “threats to democracy” just four days before a second would-be assassin tried to kill him, and months after the first assassination attempt against his life.
While Democrats have long accused President Trump of being a democracy-hating dictator, the two assassination attempts on him in successive months are what caused him to blame his critics’ words for the attempts on his life.
“That kind of rhetoric coming from the left is dangerous because he’s not a threat to democracy—he’s a threat to their idiotic agenda,” state Rep. Randy Fine, a Trump-allied firebrand, told The Floridian, echoing other Republican lawmakers in the state.
Rep. Fine suggested that Florida legislators might consider withholding budget money from the private Volusia County school—which boasts the oldest law school in the state—and received nearly $1 million in state grants for various projects. Since 2020, Stetson has received about $16 million in federal grants, most of that coming from the COVID-19 funding that President Trump put in place to help schools and businesses stay afloat during the pandemic.
“When you describe someone as a tyrant, when you compare them to Hitler, the natural response is to do something bad, so maybe the state should think twice about [more funding] going toward Stetson,” Fine said. “At a minimum, Stetson needs a pretty serious talking to.”
Stetson President Christopher Roellke declined to comment, instead punting remarks to the media relations department, which has yet to respond.
Published on Sep. 11 to recap the university’s week, the school newsletter linked to a Sep. 6 interview between Slate Magazine and Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson professor of Law, entitled “The Scariest Threat of a Second Trump Term.”
In it, Torres-Spelliscy blasts the Supreme Court’s July ruling granting former presidents (Trump) immunity from prosecution for actions tied to their official duties. This decision helped delay a criminal case against Trump alleging that he plotted to overturn his 2020 presidential loss.
She says that though she hoped the Supreme Court would have understood not to “go easy on corruption” in “the context of a post-Jan. 6 world where democracy is teetering”, they instead exhibited “almost a willful blindness to the dangers” created through their decisions.
Torres-Spelliscy worried that if the Jan. 6 Capitol protesters and the lawyers wrapped up in the so-called “fake elector scheme” are pardoned—as she believes may happen in a second Trump term—it will reward those who were “trying to break democracy”, thus creating “threats to democracy” and “undermining the rule of law."
Four days after the newsletter was published, 58-year-old Ryan Routh camped outside of Trump’s golf course with an AR-style rifle, lying in wait for the former President before the Secret Service fired at his position and chased him off the scene.
Trump's Republican allies have alleged that this “inflammatory” rhetoric incited both attempted assassinations, largely blaming the Biden-Harris Administration for pushing claims that Trump is a wanna-be dictator who “cozies up to tyrants,”—pointing out that one of the few similarities between the two would-be assassins was donations; both had forked over small-dollar donations to ActBlue, a fundraising powerhouse for Democrats that’s raised over $15 billion for progressives since its founding in 2004, Newsweek reported.
“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 destroying the country — both from the inside and out,” Trump told Fox News Digital.
**UPDATE—After The Floridian spoke to Roellke over the last weekend, the mention of Trump and the entire story was scrubbed.
Here is how the online newsletter looks now:
Florida Congressmen Brian Mast and Gus Bilirakis agreed, with Rep. Mast telling The Floridian that there is a “direct correlation” between leftist claims and the assassination attempts on Trump.
Rep. Bilirakis, a Stetson Law graduate, said that while he is grateful for his education at the Central Florida school, he is “disappointed” in Torres-Spelliscy’s rhetoric.
“It mimics the disdainful and life-threatening vitriol that has resulted in two assassination attempts against Trump,” Rep. Bilirakis told The Floridian in a statement.
As for the Democrats, state Sen. Shevrin Jones believes that the rhetoric needs to be toned down on both sides, “Democrat and Republican”, because “When you talk about politics, I don’t think we should be in the business of name-calling.”
However, he told The Floridian that Trump’s rhetoric is the one that he perceives to be particularly harmful—pointing out that he and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, propagated a debunked claim that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating people’s cats, dogs, and birds.
“That’s what they resort to because they don’t have anything else,” he said. “The rhetoric should’ve been turned down when he first got elected, and I think he just continued that because that’s what he resorts to: he doesn’t resort to policy, he doesn’t resort to what Americans need, he resorts to name-calling.”
Governor Ron DeSantis's Office has not sent a response to a request for comment.
