JD Vance has called for a reduction in pressure on American political debate following what appears to be a second assassination attempt on running mate Donald Trump.

But the Republican vice presidential nominee still appeared to blame Democrats for the threats against the former president, saying Monday that “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that nobody tried to kill Kamala Harris.”

That may be wrong: On January 6, 2021, Harris came within feet of a pipe bomb outside the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, DC, and no perpetrator has been caught.

Appearing in public for the first time since the foiled assassination attempt on his running mate on Sunday, Vance insisted that Democrats “need to shut this nonsense down” and “tone down the rhetoric.”

He later denied any responsibility for the more than 30 bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, after he and Trump repeatedly made false claims about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets there.

Authorities arrested a suspected would-be assassin who fled the Trump International Golf Course in Florida on Sunday. FBI officials said a Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel sticking out of a fence near where Trump was playing a round of golf, prompting them to fire on the suspect. They found an AK-47, two backpacks and a GoPro camera at the crime scene.

The Florida suspect, Ryan Routh, is not registered with either party, though he previously made small donations to Democrats after claiming to have voted for Trump in 2016. Thomas Crooks, the man Trump injured in an attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this summer, was a registered Republican and may have also been targeting President Joe Biden, according to FBI officials.

Vance, speaking in Atlanta for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, vowed to “do my part to tone down the rhetoric” before adding: “To the people who are telling you Donald Trump needs to be ‘eliminated,’ you need to stop it or somebody is going to get hurt.” He was referring to a November 2023 comment by Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who apologized a day later.

“We can disagree with each other, we can debate each other,” Vance said. “But we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he is elected, it will be the end of American democracy.”

Trump, meanwhile, called America under Biden a “fascist state” after he was sentenced as a convicted felon in July.

Shortly after his speech ended, Vance tweeted a message to his supporters reiterating his call to “tone down the rhetoric” and then asking his followers to “reject censorship” and attacking media organizations for correctly reporting that bomb threats had been made to schools and government buildings following his repeated false claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio are kidnapping and eating pets, even though the state’s Republican governor has said there is no evidence to support these claims.