VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (JNS.org 14-7-24)
If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way:
We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once-common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.
But the left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it is as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.
(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)
So, since at least 2016, there has been a parlor game among leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump: By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting (Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion-eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean) or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).
Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?
Yet recently, POTUS Joe Biden was a little bit more graphic and a lot more literal. In a widely reported call to hundreds of donors last week, Biden boasted: “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
“In a bullseye”?
At least Biden did not go back to the full Biden beat-up porn of the past (e.g., “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” “The press always asks me, ‘Don’t I wish I were debating him?’ No, I wish we were in high school—I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.”).
Then there is the question of the Secret Service and one’s political opponents. Given the tragic history of the Kennedys, why in the world did the Biden administration not insist that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be accorded Secret Service protection? Because his candidacy was felt to be disadvantageous to Biden?
And why just this April would the former head of the January 6th Committee and 2004 election obstructionist Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) introduce legislation ridiculously entitled “Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED) Former Protectees Act” to strip Secret Service protection for former President Trump, who by this April was the leading presidential candidate?
Had Thompson’s bill passed, would that not have been confirmation for a potential shooter to feel his task was just made much easier?
But in a wider sense, if the common referent day after day on the left is that Trump is another Hitler (cf. a recent New Republic cover on which Trump is literally Photoshopped as Hitler), then it seems reckless not to imagine an unhinged or young shootist believing that by taking out someone identical to one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he would be applauded for his violence?
So, is their logic: shoot Trump and save six million from the gas chambers?
After all, The New Republic defiantly explained their Hitler-Trump cover photo this way: “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”
