Had Saturday’s assassination attempt been carried out against President Joe Biden, we have no doubt we would have read about how the right’s dangerous rhetoric was behind it. We are old enough to remember more than a decade back when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs imagery to identify congressional districts—or, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, "extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery"—was fingered as an incitement for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D., Ariz.) shooter. (He was, in fact, a deranged individual with no discernible motivation, political or otherwise.)
We could go on: The media fatuously attributed a Georgia spa shooting in 2021 to right-wing, anti-Asian hatred while the motivations of the left-wing lunatic who almost took out Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) and other Republican lawmakers on a baseball field in 2017 went studiously unexamined.
Plenty of poisonous rhetoric has been flying around on the left for the past decade. Biden is waging a campaign whose only argument, expressed with intermittent coherency, is that democracy is on the ballot. "We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye," Biden told donors last week. Even in the 2022 midterms he was scaremongering in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, telling voters that the race was about "democracy itself" and a Republican victory would "allow dark forces to thirst," whatever that means. The New Republic and others compare former president Donald Trump to Hitler.
We don’t know whether those moronic and misguided talking points led Thomas Crooks to try to assassinate Trump, but there are a few things we do know.
- The Democratic Party has bathed itself in violent and hysterical rhetoric about Trump. See above. And yet, the Democratic Party has consistently egged on Trump in the belief that he is the weakest possible standard bearer for the GOP.
- Trump is a force of nature, a unique political talent, and a showman who at the moment of maximum danger yesterday was at his finest. As it turns out, the Republican primary voters who nominated him see things clearly.
- The media are a spectacularly incompetent and ineffectual arm of the Democratic Party that has done more to empower Trump’s rise and resurrection than any other institution in American life. Their raison d’etre is defeating Trump and they’re about to go 1 for 3.
- The ultimate dissonance comes from the well wishes of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and other pooh-bas of the Democratic Party. "Get well soon, Donald, so you can get back to destroying our democracy!" Either they didn’t actually believe their self-interested talking points about Trump the tyrant or they are coming to the realization that the public doesn’t buy it.
The Democrat-media complex has chosen the method of its destruction, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine anything other than a Trump restoration in November. We can’t help but savor it.