Hate and Assassination

"Trump Derangement Syndrome" is too gauzy and charitable a term. It's old fashioned hate, and those marketing it could care less where it leads.

The incomparable Heather Mac Donald collects the evidence, and in this article in the City Journal, lays it out. She starts by asking, “Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?”

“We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.

My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”

“There is one existential threat:” my opponent.

“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”

Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”

“America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.

“Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”

Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.

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The City Journal article continues:

Yet the Times accuses Trump alone of making “fear an animating force” in his campaigns, of using “fear as a tool” to stir up his base, and of taking “doomsday prophesying to a new extreme.” Trump alone sends the “dark, apocalyptic” message: “Be Afraid!” according to the Times. By contrast, Harris, Biden, and the Times are merely telling the truth about the existential threat that is Trump—and, in the case of Biden’s comments about black parents, about the existential threat that police pose to blacks.

The New York Times has always charged Trump with demagoguery. Over the last several weeks, however, it has made Trump’s allegedly darkening rhetoric an obsessive theme. The Times’s lack of self-awareness regarding its own hysterical rhetoric and the rhetoric of Trump’s Democratic opponents is typical of the mainstream media’s blinding self-righteousness. Democrats routinely traffic in fear-mongering about right-wing threats to democracy, to the future of the planet, to “reproductive freedom,” to the safety of “minoritized” persons and the gender-nonconforming, and to freedom of speech. (This last charge is the most preposterous, coming from the party of speech codes, the silencing of “hate speech,” and the campaign against “disinformation.”)

This is spot on, as usual with Ms. Mac Donald, but I see it in even darker tones.

Which candidate in this race has been the object of assassination attempts? We all know, and it isn’t Ms. Harris.

For present purposes, the first attempt against Trump doesn’t count, because, from the available evidence, it appears that the would-be assassin was a psychiatrically troubled young man and that his attack on Trump was opportunistic.

That is not so true of the second attempt, carried off by Ryan Routh hiding out in the bushes for hours while Trump was playing golf. According to this Snopes article, Routh had been harshly critical of Trump in tones not dissimilar to those quoted above.

According to [an AP] article, Routh wrote in the book that Iran was "free to assassinate Trump," and called the former president a "fool" and "buffoon." He described himself as someone who once voted for Trump but whose optimism had since soured….

Although Routh's various social media accounts have since been deleted, reputable news outlets who looked into them reported that Routh had posts both supporting and opposing Trump…[but] that he had turned strongly against the former president in recent years.

Does this prove that Rough acted from political motivation? Not by itself, but it’s more than a little suggestive.

The suggestion is, regrettably, enhanced by a history of other anti-democratic assassination attempts undertaken by Leftist partisans — attempts now deep-sixed by the MSM even as it falls all over itself to fan the hatred it claims to abhor.

The first of these attempts was the nearly successful effort to murder Rep. Steve Scalise and numerous other Republican legislators, an attempt undertaken by Bernie Sanders volunteer James Hodgkinson, who came armed to the teeth. (Sanders was in haste to denounce the attack, very likely sincerely in my view).

The more recent assassination attempt was by abortion enthusiast Nicholas Roske. As I wrote here, Roske traveled to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in the middle of the night on June 8, 2022, wearing black clothing and carrying a suitcase, a backpack, and several items and weapons: a Glock-17 pistol with ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape, a pistol light, and boots padded to be stealthy. Fortunately, Roske was apprehended by the authorities before he entered Kavanaugh’s house. It’s undisputed that his intent was to assassinate Kavanaugh for his “complicity” in the Dobbs opinion, a copy of which had been leaked a month earlier by a person or persons still unidentified.

What’s regrettably noteworthy about Roske’s behavior is that it followed the words of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. As the Wall Street Journal recounted at the time:

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump.

Mr. Schumer was speaking before abortion-rights activists as the Supreme Court considers whether to curtail the ability of abortion providers to sue on behalf of women seeking abortions—a doctrine known as third-party standing. Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Question: Have you heard a single word about Roske or Hodgkinson amidst all the purported angst about Trump’s being a threat to democracy and — get this — an independent judiciary?

Answer: No you haven’t, and it’s not because you’re deaf. It’s because the MSM wants you to think that only Trump presents a menace of violence (at the minimum), and in order to do that, it needs to bury the established record of actual violence by Leftist enthusiasts.

This is not to say that there’s going to be another attempt on Trump’s life or that, if there is (which I think is likely), it will directly be caused by the hate campaign against him now being conducted at ten zillion decibels by his enemies. It is, however, to say that the Democrats’ dark and grossly hyperbolic warnings about the existential dangers to democracy Trump supposedly presents are, not merely irresponsibly menacing, but more than enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.