Trump: “Well, I was waiting for you to read that, because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
[Me, now: Norah and her ilk are indeed horrible people. ]
O’Donnell: “Do you think he was referring to you?”
[Me, now: What an asshole! She knows he was referring to Trump. Playing coy like that is unprofessional, and was intended to annoy the President.]
Trump: “I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all— stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview.’”
[Me, now: He shouldn’t say he was “completely exonerated,” because that’s impossible regarding all three of the smears. But the President appropriately notes that he agreed to do the interview on a program that actively tried to defeat him, and can fairly be described as an Axis of Unethical Conduct contributor.]
Trump, continuing: “I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things. You shouldn’t be reading that on ’60 Minutes.’ You’re a disgrace. But go ahead, let’s finish the interview.”
O’Donnell can be excused for reading the quote: it’s newsworthy in many ways, including as a clear indication that the former President she voted for was lying when he wrote that the writer’s motives were unclear. Since that aspect of the interview can be classified as fair journalism, Trump’s angry response was unfair, but in the context of his treatment by the news media generally including O’Donnell, also excusable.
4. I am already reading attempts to jiu jitsu the latest assassination attempt into another wave of anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment activism. That takes gall: the Democrats and progressives work relentlessly to demonize the President of the United States with rhetoric that places a metaphorical target on his head, heart and back for deluded “patriots” to shoot at, and then, when the inevitable happens, they blame the attacks on the right to bear arms. This would-be shooter purchased his weapons legally, and why not? He had no criminal record.
5. Here is how all progressives, Democrats and ethical anti-Trump citizens should be capable of reacting. Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.), said yesterday that the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner proved that President Trump’s case for the construction of a White House ballroom is valid. “We were there front and center,” Fetterman wrote on X. “That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.”
It doesn’t matter whether Trump or Fetterman is right about the ballroom. What matters is that a political opponent of the President is capable of saying, writing or thinking, “Huh. I think the President has a point here.” The vast, vast majority of Democrats and progressives are emotionally and intellectually incapable of reaching such a conclusion due to cognitive dissonance and the fact that bias makes us stupid. It is also soothing to have a Democratic Senator acknowledge that Trump Derangement infests his party.
Now do mainstream media anti-Trump bias, Senator…
Ethics Alarms 
You make a fair point about Obama, but my point is always: “I condemn any form of political violence regardless of the victim.” It makes it very easy to be consistent. I don’t care who does it or why they do it. I condemn it. No qualifications. I condemn it.
That should be the standard line coming out of every politician’s mouth in every such instance. Problem is that so many of them use violent rhetoric to start with.
So, that is what I liked about Obama’s statement, but your points are well-taken.
-Jut
Well you can’t go to a “No Kings” protest to unseat the president and say something like
“What we’re seeing right now … is not consistent with American democracy,” he added. “It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orbán. It’s consistent with places that hold elections but do not otherwise observe what we think of [as] a fair system in which everybody’s voice matters and people have a seat at the table, and there are checks and balances, and nobody’s above the law. We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.”
and then claim that you have nothing to do with the problem. You can’t say that the current president is not a validly elected official and is someone who has usurped the government (become a king) and then feign ignorance when people try to kill him for it. This especially goes when you yourself acted much more like a king than the current president is.
John Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise.
But it’s concerning. The only way to get a Democrat to be reasonable is if they suffer brain damage.
No, Fetterman wasn’t reasonable when he had brain damage. He became more and more reasonable as he RECOVERED from brain damage.
Twitchy makes the point that the manifesto is not very original, but almost entirely based on very ordinary everyday talking points from Democrat politicians. The article below show many tweets at X from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who almost has reason to sue the shooter for plagiarism, this includes all the Nazi and pedophile references in the manifestor.
Obama and Raskin are gaslighting us by playing coy about who inspired this shooter.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2026/04/27/just-guess-which-senator-whcd-gunmen-quoted-very-often-hint-he-compares-republicans-to-nazis-a-lot-n2427577
Why is the senator who suffered a catastrophic stroke the one making sense???
This is the second author this morning who engages in Civil War rhetoric. The first one is Rod Dreher who is about to publish a book about Weimar America. Call me a pessimist, but I am afraid that this rhetoric is not hyperbole. Imagine for a moment that the assassin had succeeded, what would be the ramifications for the USA.
The full text of the tweet is at the bottom of my comment.
After the Spanish Right won the 1933 elections, Communists in Asturias launched a revolution, killing thousands before the army was deployed to finally put an end to the chaos.
They did the same thing in Catalonia, and when that too was quelled, they engaged in a low-level terrorist campaign all over the country, planting bombs, sabotaging infrastructure, assassinating newspaper editors and political figures, and staging general strikes all over Spain.
They kept doing this until they finally won the 1936 election, at which point the Left went full mask-off and began unleashing thousands of criminals into the streets, ransacking businesses, dragging conservatives out of their homes to beat them, and going into the countryside to expropriate private property. The entire country descended into a state of near-total anarchy in a matter of months.
The Left spent years agitating for a Marxist revolution in Spain and refused to obey the legal system because they saw the Spanish Republic as a mechanism to achieve Leftism, not as a neutral system intended to uphold democracy, the constitution, or the rule of law.
And thus, any deviation from the march towards Leftism was seen as an illegitimate act of treason and proof of an imminent fascist takeover of the state. As a result, ANY electoral victory by the Right was inherently treated as illegal by the Left, and ANY attempt to actually govern in accordance with Right-wing principles was seen as just cause to engage in violent insurrection.
You cannot have a country like this for long. If one side treats the process as illegitimate unless it produces their desired ideological outcome, they will inevitably win unless they’re physically stopped.