If you’re like me, you’ve recoiled with the assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Who wouldn’t? Except possibly the most bitter and despicable people who wish the worst for those with whom they disagree politically. Trump may be the most despised man his detractors have ever known. They include the members of the most liberal, indeed socialist, corporate propaganda complex in America, leftist news outlets, websites, social media, newspapers, and other printed media who are completely in the tank for anyone who opposes Trump. That’s their right. But it’s also the bane of our society. Why? Because many of these outlets spew the rhetoric that places Trump in the same category as tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and third world dictators who terrorize their own population and beyond.
Consider what’s been said of him. His most ardent opponents engage in incendiary language designed to portray him as a wicked tyrant committed to destroying democracy. Never mind that we are a Republic with separate powers that possess the ability to stop such tyranny dead in its tracks. They persist in asserting that if Trump is elected again, our nation will cease to be free. That’s so absurd that it would—as the British like to say—make a cat laugh.
This sort of hateful talk has come directly from the top. In recent months, Joe Biden, in a cringe-worthy moment to his big donors said, it’s “time to put Trump in a bullseye.” He has since sought to clarify that by saying that he didn’t say “crosshairs,” as if such a distinction absolves him of a provocative characterization designed solely to demonize Trump, dare I say target him.
Congress has gotten into the act as well. Ultra Trump-hater Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) who was a senior staffer assisting in the effort to impeach Trump, said in an interview on MSNBC to former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, that Trump should be “eliminated.” Shall we assume he meant it, or was this just a Freudian slip reminiscent of the language of the KGB of old? Who could take such a statement as a call to action? Who indeed.
On the afternoon of the second attempt on Trump’s life, the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stirred up yet more hate by writing this on his social media. “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025…We must stop them.” I wonder how we stop them. Maybe with someone hiding in the bushes as the former President arrives at a putting green yards away?
And of course, how can we ignore the ever-resentful language of Hillary Clinton one day after a gunman was interrupted in his design to murder Trump. Said Clinton, “The object in this case is Donald Trump. His demagoguery. His danger to our country and the world.” No ambiguity there. No responsible calls for reducing the inflammatory rhetoric either. The woman is so possessed of resentment for losing to Trump in 2016 that she cannot summon the self-discipline to avoid such public loathing.
To be sure, Donald Trump himself is given to hyperbolic speech and exaggerated expressions. Sometimes he invites the criticism he gets, like when he said he would be a dictator for a little while on his first day back in office. Democrats were quick to take Trumpian rhetorical exaggeration and turn him into Hitler redux. It wasn’t a serious statement, but one the Democrats seized on to add fuel to their otherwise gross distortions about a man who defeated Clinton. They were petrified that he would do the same to Joe Biden until they unceremoniously defenestrated him for Kamala Harris.
It would be easy at this point to simply declare that the Democrats are exceedingly inappropriate for painting Trump as a danger in terms that could be interpreted by fringe actors as a call to violence. After all, if he is a dictator and a threat to democracy, shouldn’t he be stopped by any means? But let’s not be so quick to let his haters off the hook so easily.
In truth, what we’re witnessing is the most irresponsible rhetoric by a political party in the history of the modern presidency. They’re de facto appealing to the worst possible instincts of Americans to fear Trump’s reelection as an existential threat to our Republic. It’s not. They are the threat and here is why.
If you seek to enflame the raw and seething emotions of unhappy people, you will not get a rational response, but rather behavior certain to become violent. One need only look at the antisemitic bile of pro-Hamas protesters on US campuses. Democrats and their like should be careful. They’re putting our nation at grave risk when they stoke the fires of hatred. Stop it now.
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