No president (weirdly, except for Gerald Ford) can say that. However, while Ford’s two attempted assassins – a deranged Manson groupie and a mentally ill housewife – came far too close to permanently changing the trajectory of American history, let’s not kid ourselves: the comparison has one obvious limit. That is to say, it’s not like the media was trying to promote Manson family talking points (or whatever the hell Sara Jane Moore was mad about) in 1975. Granted, it was still the 70’s – admittedly, one of the weirdest decades in American history – but the two assassins in that case were clearly just deluded. They didn’t have virtually the entire elite class not-so-secretly wishing for their success.
The same cannot be said of Donald Trump. In fact, given the rhetoric which both the media and the Democrat party have propagated about him, it’s arguably nothing short of a miracle that it took this long for serious attempts to be made on Trump’s life. Everyone in the media is complicit, even some nominal Republicans. And frankly, while the attack by Thomas Matthew Crooks was easy to dismiss as the work of a mysterious lone wolf crank, the fact that this has happened twice, and that the second shooter – one Ryan Wesley Routh – is so obviously a left-wing partisan with a particular fixation on Ukraine (he’s for them) and Israel (he’s against them) is impossible to ignore. Routh will rightly get the book thrown at him, but make no mistake: the overwhelmingly liberal media are all his unindicted co-conspirators.
If you doubt that, just look at the following sample of media and liberal rhetoric (but we repeat ourselves) both leading up to and following this second assassination attempt.
Kamala Harris has said, over and over again, that “Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.” She has openly asked whether she or Trump “has to come out alive” before laughing. The former Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, is even worse, describing Trump as “a threat to this nation,” an “existential threat,” a “threat to everything America stands for,” a “threat to the very soul of this country,” and that’s just a sample. Not to be outdone, Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, has out and out said that Republicans are “going to put peoples’ lives in danger.” There are so many statements like this by leading lights of the Democrat party that it’s almost easier to ask who hasn’t implied, if not outright stated, that Trump should be assassinated. In the latter category, two particularly shameful examples stand out, however: first, Rep. Stacey Plaskett, of the Virgin Islands, has literally said “Trump needs to be shot.” Also, Rick Wilson, the infamously intemperate mascot for the NAMBLA cover band known as the Lincoln Project, has called for someone “to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.”
But, the less informed reader might say, those are all elected officials whose job it is to beat Trump. Where is the evidence the media is involved? Well, to answer that, we would just ask them to look at how the latest assassination attempt has been covered. And yes, this was an assassination attempt. Routh brought GoPros and an AK-47 to the Trump golf course. He had military training and very clearly was planning to snipe Trump from a hole away. That he was foiled by the Secret Service is a testament to their having learned from the last attack, not evidence that this attempt wasn’t serious.
And yet, the media wants nothing more than to either downplay the whole sordid affair, or (incredibly) to blame the victim. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News already attempted to tie the assassination attempt to Trump’s “baseless claims” on the campaign trail. Small wonder that, according to NBC News itself, this attempted murder of a president was only a “golf course incident.” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark has instead laid the blame at Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, claiming that Vance incited “potential violence with lies.” The Cincinnati Enquirer sniffed that Trump “brings a lot of this stuff on himself.” Bloomberg and Philip Bump of the Washington Post, meanwhile, are more terrified that Trump may be able to make political gains using the incident than they are that a former president might be murdered. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine might be the most honest of the lot, though; he simply claims that “Trump is a threat to democracy, and to say so is not incitement.”
Let’s be clear: all of this is not just absurd, cowardly, and passive aggressive at best, it’s also despicable and dangerous. Say what you like about President Trump’s rhetoric, but it’s worth nothing that one line he conspicuously has not crossed has been calling for the assassination of his political opponents. At worst, he’s only ever said he wants to lock them up for committing crimes. Yet to hear the media tell it, Trump is so unspeakably evil that all our norms around denouncing and ostracizing those who commit political violence should be thrown out the window, because putting down this particular threat is just that urgent. Not only is this inexplicable by any measure, seeing as Trump didn’t exactly usher in Kristallnacht the last time he was president, but you have to wonder if this assemblage of glorified theater kids have even thought this through.
Seriously, what do they think will happen if – God forbid – another assassination attempt occurs, and this time, the shooter succeeds? Do they think everyone will forget what they said now? And, more importantly, do they think Republicans will mourn, even performatively, for any Democrat leader who is the target of political violence now that they know their own leaders are treated as pond scum to be euthanized? Hey, media, here’s a news flash: a lot of them won’t.
We get it; you hate Trump because he’s mean and makes you look stupid and corrupt (and to be fair, you may have rigged a presidential debate against him so he may be right about that), but seriously, do you think anyone outside your echo chamber will respect the idea that everyone deserves the respect due leaders of this country except for Donald Trump? It’s not 2016 anymore; Trump’s not an upstart who commanded a plurality of the Republican party, and who you could brush off as a political aberration. Whatever you think of him, Trump is now a former president, not to mention the overwhelming favorite to resume the presidency of the United States for half the country, including even some lifelong Democrats. And frankly, apart from everything else, he’s gold for ratings, so even setting aside anything high-minded or moral, we’re frankly shocked that you’re all so hasty to literally kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
But who are we kidding? The media isn’t smart enough to consider any of that. For cosseted, empty-headed third-rate thinkers like the average talking head, Trump is a threat to democracy, not because of anything he’s actually done but because he’s a threat to rule by people like them. That is to say, by preening, telegenic mediocrities who can’t even get out a coherent sentence without a team of writers, yet still flatter themselves that they’re the guardians of American democracy and freedom. Trump – who knows all their tricks and knows how to fight most of them – is an existential threat not to their business model, but to their pretensions. They want him dead because he holds up a mirror to their own mediocrity, and to the failure and decadence of the permanent Washington class who keep their artificially inflated status safe. After all, if they – the people whose job it supposedly is to “control how people think" – can’t stop a boorish, declasse outsider from assuming the presidency, then everyone will know that they not only don’t control how people think, but no longer can. They, not to mention the permanent Washington class, will be forced to compete, rather than living on the fumes of past prestige. And…come on, do you really think they’re even capable of that?
Well, excuse us if we’re playing the world’s smallest violin, now that Trump was attacked by someone who actually believed all their alarmist nonsense about whatever current thing they were told to be upset about, and actually believed in the ideas symbolized by the countless emojis they keep switching out of their bios for clout. Ideas have consequences; pace AOC, they’re not just fashion statements to be touted at the Met Gala. The media may be turning their faces aside from the consequences of their ideas, but Americans will not, and nor should they. Denying and excusing the repeated near-death of a political reformer is the only “threat to democracy” we can see, which means that this November, Americans must act to defeat it and elect the very man who the political class would rather see dead than allow the people to take back their country.
