When it comes to the reaction to the second attempted assassination in the last eight weeks on Donald Trump, the reaction from the Left-wing legacy media and Democrats is astonishing — the reaction that the real problem here is Trump’s rhetoric.
According to these people, if someone tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, God forbid, the problem would be Trump’s rhetoric. And if somebody attempts to assassinate Trump, the problem is also his rhetoric.
Underlying all of this appears to be a secret desire that some on the Left have actually let slip, which is that it would be much better if Trump just went away and something very, very bad happened to him.
Many of the people on the Left are not going to say they want Trump to get shot in the head or something as graphic as that. But they believe Trump is a uniquely dangerous figure, which is why every major Democratic politician has said precisely that. They constantly suggest Trump is somehow a unique danger to the republic.
For those who don’t have an institutional memory of politics, Democrats used to say the same about Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush. They have said it more with regard to Trump because he is an out-of-the-box figure who defeated their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
But a feeling persists among folks on the Left, almost an assassination mania, when a Right-wing president is in office. An entire movie was made while George W. Bush was president of the United States titled, “The Assassination of George W. Bush.”
So the question is: Why?
I think the answer has to do with the way the Right sees the Left and the way the Left sees the Right in this country.
Conservatives tend not to see people on the Left as evil. They tend to see them as misguided. But people on the Left have a tendency to see people on the Right as evil, as actually morally deficient in some key respect.
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But the crux of the matter is this: People on the Left also have another viewpoint which makes it hard for them to sustain the belief that conservatives are evil. They believe human beings are inherently good, yet Right-wingers are evil, beliefs which contradict each other.
If you’re on the Right, you tend to believe human beings are capable of both good and evil, and because of that, many people who are doing bad things are not doing so because they’re innately evil; they’re doing so because they’ve made bad decisions.
That belief in the imperfectability of mankind leads to a forgiveness-oriented nature toward a fellow man. If you believe that human beings are not perfectable, if you believe that all human beings struggle with sin, that means you’re significantly more likely to be forgiving of your neighbor because you struggle with the same problems. You also have trouble making decisions. Sometimes you have a problem discerning between what’s good and what’s bad.
However, for the Left, the idea is that all human beings are created absolutely good, innocent, and decent, so the Left has a very difficult time understanding people who don’t think like they do. There must be something defective about those people.
So what do they think about leaders? If you are a conservative, you tend to think that leaders of Left-wing movements have popular backing. You don’t find it all that hard to understand that in a democracy, people who disagree with you might be wrong, they might be misguided, they might believe in what’s evil, but they have a popular movement behind them.
Thus, when it comes to horrible acts like assassination, removing a leader does not change the nature of the movement. On the Right side of the aisle, nobody actually believes if, God forbid, something happened to Harris, natural or otherwise, that the movement backing Harris would just dissipate and go away. Nobody actually believes that.
But the reverse is not true. Because many on the Left believe people are naturally good but Trump, as a “Right-wing leader,” is a moral defective leading people astray, they too believe that if Trump were removed from the scene, then everything would go back to normal, that there would be a sort of reversion back to the innate goodness of humanity.
That’s the only way I can explain the tepid response to an attempted assassination against a political figure in the United States. Two in the span of eight weeks.
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I would be absolutely livid and beside myself if somebody tried to assassinate a politician that I radically disagree with — for example, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That would be a grave act of evil. That person should be found. That person should be put on death row, obviously. And anybody who even attempted such would be committing a grave act of evil, and, by the way, a useless act of evil, even from a politically-conflicting perspective because getting rid of somebody on the other side of the aisle doesn’t change the nature of the political conflicts in general. Human beings think differently. Human beings have flaws. Human beings disagree.
On the Left, there is this weird idea that if something happened to Trump, the world would just be a better place. It’s unmistakable in their rhetoric. Again, they’re not going to say out loud they wish Trump would get shot. Many of them are not going to say that out loud — because I think they would have a hard time facing up to the possibility that many of them actually believe the world would be better off if Donald Trump just disappeared.
But the reality is that the rhetoric they are constantly expressing with regard to Trump is not the same as rhetoric expressed about Harris or Biden by the Right. It just isn’t.
When people on the Right talk about Biden or Harris, we say that he’s a horrible president, and she’s a horrible vice president. They’re doing terrible things for the country, but nobody actually believes they are such single, important figures that there isn’t a popular movement backing them. If Biden were to retire or pass away tomorrow, to just disappear from the public scene, the movement behind him would be exactly the same.
If Harris had not been the nominee, it would’ve been somebody else. Everybody knows this.
But the Left does not believe this about Trump. They believe that he is the single font of evil in the modern world.
The corollary to that is, if you keep saying over and over that Trump is not only the apex of evil, but a sort of weird, evil magician who can whip people into a cult-like frenzy around him, then removal of this figure would change the trajectory of history.
And all it takes is one nut to take that message seriously — to pick up a gun, sit in a tree for 12 hours, and wait for a former president to reach his location on a golf course and shoot him.
