“I was beginning to think I was being extreme by concluding that the 2015-to-the-present constant drumbeat that Trump is an evil monster Hitler white supremacist super villain who will enslave us all was a significant catalyst for Trump’s shooting. Then I checked Professor Turley’s blog. True, he’s got a book out about the dangers of extreme political rhetoric, but the fact that the professor reaches the same conclusion I have is comforting. He writes in part,

“For months, politicians, the press and pundits have escalated reckless rhetoric in this campaign on both sides. That includes claims that Trump was set to kill democracy, unleash “death squads” and make homosexuals and reporters “disappear.”President Biden has stoked this rage rhetoric. In 2022, Biden held his controversial speech before Independence Hall where he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the people. Biden recently referenced the speech and has embraced the claims that this could be our last democratic election….Some of us have been objecting for years that this rage rhetoric is a dangerous political pitch for the nation. While most people reject the hyperbolic claims, others take it as true. They believe that homosexuals are going to be “disappeared” as claimed on ABC’s “The View” or that the Trump “death squads” are now green lighted by a conservative Supreme Court, as claimed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow…

“As soon as Trump was elected, unhinged rage became the norm as with Kathy Griffin featuring herself holding the bloody severed head of Trump. Just recently, another celebrity, actress Lea DeLaria, begged Biden to “blow [Trump] up” after the recent presidential immunity decision. DeLaria explained that “this is a **** war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our **** country. And these a**holes are going to take it away. They’re going to take it away.”

“For months, people have heard politicians and press call Trump “Hitler” and the GOP a Nazi movement. Some compared stopping Trump to stopping Hitler in 1933. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) declared Trump “is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated”…Others say that Trump “will destroy the world” unless he is stopped.”

Turley didn’t mention that while Trump was President, an adaptation of “Julius Caesar” was staged in Central Park with Trump as Caesar, and the audience cheering his assassination nightly. The claims that “both sides” have engaged in this level of dangerous rhetoric is proof of corruption.

“It is strikingly obvious that President Biden and the Democrats (and their media propagandists) have no intention of moderating their message of fear and hate despite the temporary lip-service to that objective. In a post-assassination attempt interview with Lester Holt, Biden said it was a mistake to use the word “bullseye” while discussing former President Trump, but that he meant to “focus on what [Trump is] doing.” Yeah, that’s exactly what “bullseye” means, Joe. Then, despicably, he said that he didn’t use “crosshairs.” That was a cheap shot reference to his pals claiming that Sarah Palin was responsible for Gabby Giffords’ shooting because the former Alaska governor had used crosshair graphics to indicate Democratic districts the GOP should try to flip. Palin never said to put Giffords “in the crosshairs,” and, of course, she wasn’t President of the United States.

“In post-shooting speeches and interviews, Biden has said things like “Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” and that Trump is “a real danger to the country.” Yes, that’s the kind of fearmongering that got Trump shot. The Democrats have nothing else—this is the whole message: vote for us even though we’ve messed up because the other candidate will destroy America. In his interview with Lester Holt, Biden—AGAIN–claimed that Trump had said that white supremacists in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” The Left has to really terrify voters to get them to cast a ballot for Biden, so the calls for moderate rhetoric were and are insincere.”

Below is the first EA post after Trump was nearly killed in 2024. I could have used it to comment on last night’s near tragedy with minimal changes.

***

There are so many stunning examples of the apparently irrepressible Trump hate and anti-Trump bias in the news media that it would take an over-long post to thoroughly document it. I decided that the one above was the blue ribbon winner; I can’t even imagine the degree of ugly bias in a news room that would permit a headline like that to reach publication. Then there was CNN’s characteristically disgusting fake news spin:

Anyone looking at the video could see that Trump didn’t “fall;” he ducked down after feeling a bullet hit his ear and hearing gunshots. In its front page photo, the New York Times carefully cropped out the American flag over Trump’s head, making the spectacular composition of the original photo…

…look ugly: this was obvious cognitive dissonance scale manipulation. Mustn’t have any positive imagery linked to that monster Trump! Quickly after the incident, as EA already noted, a CNN talking head criticized him for saying “Fight!” minutes after he was shot, as blood dripped down his face. As I also noted, some found it an appropriate time to suggest that Trump’s upraised fist was another fascist “dog whistle.”

This was a confirmation bias classic: commenter Joel Mundt sent me these photos, none of which inspired a similar interpretation.

Gee, I wonder why? There was also a lot of triumphal fist-raising yesterday at Wimbledon too, but then we all know that pro tennis is a hotbed of fascism.

Yes, I believe that the news media’s unending assault on Trump can fairly and legitimately be implicated in the assassination attempt. On July 9th, Times pundit James McWhorter was chastised by Glenn Loury on his podcast for writing that he wished someone would kill Trump. McWhorter: “I have taken a great deal of heat for saying, or implying, that I wish somebody would kill Donald Trump. And that is exactly what I was implying. It was irresponsible ….Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I said it. And it was irresponsible of me to say that in a public space. I really shouldn’t have said it here. Now I already did, and so, you know, I have to own it, I did say it. Somebody has asked, you know, ‘Do you say that in private?’ And, yes, I have said it often, and I have only halfway been kidding, and I’m gonna say it again, yes. And it is a smaller side of me. I should not wish for another person to suffer, even if it’s a hideous pig of a man like him.”

Loury, hardly a conservative, replied, “Uh, do you realize what hell will have been unleashed upon the country if people start and continue to talk like that? You — This is not something that you can just casually throw around: killing politicians whom you don’t like. That is, that is not a way that you want to run the railroad, here, man, I mean, that’s — that’s disaster. Do you think it ends there? Do you think that if somebody were to do something along the lines of what you’re suggesting, that would be the end of it? You’d unleash the whirlwind.” 

Has it? Has it unleashed the whirlwind? To my eye, the Trump Deranged refuse to accept any responsibility for their death wishes and extreme vilification that seemed to compel a violent response.

Numerous journalists have said that Trump is responsible for his own assassination attempt because of his “hateful rhetoric.” My smart, retired government lawyer family member tried to huminahumina away the Axis complicity in the placing of a bullseye on Trump, literally what President Biden called for just a few days ago when he said,”We’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” She cited as provocation Trump’s calling “immigrants” “vermin” and saying that they “poisoned the blood of the nation.” 1) You do mean illegal immigrants don’t you? This is what comes of watching MSNBC, 2) Oh! He was mean to the people who come here illegally, many of whom commit horrific crimes? Of course someone should shoot him, then. Good point. 3) Somehow I think declaring a candidate Hitler, and an existential threat to democracy and the nation is just a scosche more of an actual call to violence than the victim’s own hyperbolic description of reality.

On July 3, British pundit Mark Steyn noted that BBC presenter David Aaronovitch called on Biden to murder Trump:

Later, post ear-shot, Steyn reminded readers of this op-ed in the Washington Post by columnist Robert Kagan. Sample quote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending… With each passing day, it will become harder & more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal.” Steyn asks, “If what Mr Kagan and The Washington Post assert is correct, why would you not act upon it?”

Why indeed. Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson just last month tried to strip Trump of his Secret Service protection. He also was one of the leaders of the Jan. 6 kangaroo committee investigation in the House. His field director, Jacqueline Marsaw, tweeted after Trump was shot,

Of course, Thompson had to fire her, though there is no question that she was only saying out loud what the Congressman’s office and staff—and he himself—really think.

Fire-breathing PJ Media columnist Stephen Kruiser wrote this morning, “The Democrats have done everything they could since 2016 to make last Saturday happen, dutifully aided and abetted by their flying monkeys in the mainstream media. I use the word unhinged a lot when writing about the Left, not because I have a limited vocabulary, but because it’s the most accurate description of the way that they have been behaving since Trump was elected.”

Unfair? Excessive? If so, not by much. This was the New Republic’s cover last month:

Finally, here’s red-pilled former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi at his substack, in his essay titled, “The Slow-Motion Assassination: Self-described guardians of democracy spent years creating a lethal atmosphere around Donald Trump”:

Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”

But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.

Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. . . .

After the 2016 election, Trump began to be described as a new kind of American villain, someone not quite entitled to normal rights — the political equivalent of an “enemy combatant.” Weeks after inauguration, California congresswoman Maxine Waters blithely said Trump was guilty of “sex actions” and “collusion” described in the Steele dossier, and as for evidence, “We just have to… do the investigation and find it.”

Waters has always been on the edge of the credibility spectrum, but this chucking of the presumption of innocence raised few eyebrows, for that new reason: Because Trump. Fellow Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them. There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime — TREASON — after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The office of Trump’s lawyer was raided on a dubious pretext (leading to this year’s criminal prosecution), news that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime. Even Schiff’s attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite concept of “disloyalty to country” as a means of unseating Trump was received politely by media arbiters like Chuck Todd.

Most of the early madness surrounding Trump expressed itself as religious worship of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his investigation. Solemn readings of the Mueller report by actors like John Lithgow and Annette Bening really happened. The failure of that Great Deliverance to come to pass seems to be when officials shifted their tone toward the current posture that Trump needs to be stopped “at all costs.”

Bingo. If the Trump-hating Left had any integrity, it would accept responsibility for the predictable results of its unprecedented demonizing of a former President.

It doesn’t.