If we were in high school, I’d take him (Donald Trump) behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
-Former US Vice President Joe Biden, 20 March 2018.
It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.
-President Biden, 08 July 2024 (he later apologised for it).
The Democratic Party and its celebrity allies enabled the murderous attack on former President Donald Trump on 13th July. They have poured nonstop venom at him for years. And why not? When a latter-day ‘Hitler’ threatens American democracy, the rules of the game no longer hold. Anything goes, including calls for violence and murder. What was once taboo has been normalised in no time.
While every postwar Republican president has been labelled as fascist, Trump’s arrival on the political stage and the ensuing ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ have made matters worse. Soon after he announced his candidacy for the first time in 2015, entertainers began considering ways to harm him.
Actor Robert De Niro wished “to punch him in the face.” “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” Johnny Depp wondered. For comedian Kathy Griffin, political satire meant a photoshoot holding a fake decapitated Trump head. An “outraged” Madonna “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”
In a campaign poster for Democrat Senator Jon Tester of Montana, rock band Pearl Jam depicted the White House on fire with an eagle pecking at a dead Trump, and bassist Jeff Ament defending it as his First Amendment (free speech) right. Compare this with the poor rodeo clown who received a lifetime ban for wearing an Obama mask at a bull riding contest at the Missouri State Fair! What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Isn’t it?
Republican leaders promptly denounced any hate thrown at Obama from corners of the right. The Democrats? Not so much. They were silent for the most part, while some doubled down on their rhetoric. Their rage went beyond Trump. Even Supreme Court justices were not spared. This left Republicans assaulted, booed, chased, heckled, picketed, and facing attempted assassination.
Days after the November 2016 presidential election, the audience repeatedly booed Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president-elect, and the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton lectured him in New York City. Pence was accompanied by his daughter and her cousins.
In a failed massacre of Republican lawmakers, James Hodgkinson, a 2016 volunteer of Bernie Sanders for President, opened fire on the party’s Congressional baseball team in June 2017, gravely injuring Representative Steve Scalise and four others. “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.,” he earlier wrote on Facebook.
In November 2017, a Democrat neighbour assaulted Kentucky Senator Rand Paul over a landscaping dispute, leaving him with five broken ribs and a bout of pneumonia.
In a single week in June 2018, Democrat activists hounded Trump’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen out of a Mexican restaurant in Washington DC and accosted Special Adviser Stephen Miller at another. The owner of a Virginia diner asked Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to leave because she worked for the Trump administration.
California Representative Maxine Waters still called on her supporters the week after to “harass” Trump officials. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Waters later amplified her vitriol, saying she has “no sympathy” for members of the administration. “The people are going to turn on them… They’re going to absolutely harass them.”
Because Trump appointed three justices, which gave the Conservatives a 6-3 edge on the bench, the Supreme Court of the United States infuriated the Democrats. Speaking to a pro-abortion crowd on the steps of the court while the justices heard a related case inside in March 2020, then Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer threatened two by name.
“I want to tell you, (Neil) Gorsuch. I want to tell you, (Brett) Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” the New York Democrat said.
Hit you? With what? Pay the price? For what? Deciding a case one way or another? In a rare rebuke, Chief Justice John Roberts defended his colleagues saying, “statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.” Mobs still turned up at the homes of conservative justices, including one person with a plan to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh.
And what prompted the 2004 “election denier” (the in-phrase in DC since November 2020) Bennie Thompson and eight other House Democrats to introduce a bill in April this year ridiculously titled, “Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated Towards Convicted and Extremely Dishonourable (DISGRACED) Former Protectees Act,” if not making things easier for any future assassin of Trump?
The bill proposed to strip Trump of Secret Service protection once he was indicted in any of the several cases foisted upon him as part of Democrats’ relentless lawfare in different parts of the country.
Coming to Democrats’ key media megaphone, MSNBC, the company’s executives benched the “Morning Joe” show the Monday (15 July) after the assassination attempt on Trump. The decision was made “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.”
Another host, Joy Reid, recently took to TikTok asking Democrats to let her know whom she “got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” Not to forget the lead anchor Rachel Maddow, who read a lot about Hitler to prepare for the Trump presidency.
To be fair, the person who pulls the trigger or hits someone is to be blamed. But when the entire establishment seems to endorse what was once a no-go zone– calling for the death of president or wishing death upon the leading opposition figure, comparing his party to the Nazis, and ad nauseum calling him Hitler– is it any surprise if someone crazy decides to act? Hitlers deserve no mercy, after all!
Shots have been fired twice in less than a decade. Both times, Republicans had a narrow escape, thankfully. Can we have the November election sans blood lust? Let us hope that the Democrats will tone down on their rhetoric a bit. It is not too much to wish.
