The Roots of the Trump Assassination Attempts

In many Third-World countries, falling out of power means being declared an enemy of the people who needs to be done away. In some situations that means trumped-up charges and made-up evidence—lawfare—to mislabel the fallen leader as evil and justify the life sentence he receives. In other situations, jail is not secure enough, such as when the fallen leader still has many supporters. That means he must be killed.

The murder can be a well-planned assassination, an “accident” or true up-against-the-wall execution. It’s all necessary for the greater good, especially if the nation wants to claim higher goals at work—for example, saving itself from a worse fate, like loss of “democracy.” Dictators in power are democracy advocates, and dictators out of power are fascists, infidels, and enemies of the people.

Donald Trump is an enemy of democracy itself, says the left in writing and from the debate stage. It is then not surprising when people, often mentally ill enough to accept the base argument that someone who served four years as president, who defeated multiple impeachment attempts without resorting to tanks on the Capitol lawn, and who has run via the electoral system for president three times, is not a believer in democracy.

Would-be killers have seen lawfare fail. Of course it did; it was based on in one instance the manipulation of the justice system to transform a payoff to a porn star as part of a legal nondisclosure agreement from a simple misdemeanor (if that) into 34 separate felonies. In another instance, the lawfare was so weak an attempt on the candidate that a single woman’s vague testimony from decades earlier was enough to convict him and fine him enough to bring him near bankruptcy—all enabled by a Covid-era legal device revitalizing charges long past their statute of limitations.

In other instances, the lawfare was too thin to even hurt. Trump once faced 91 charges in four jurisdictions. Now he faces 12. He’s been convicted on the 34 noted above and seen 45 charges dismissed. The remaining charges face their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken while in office. As in most Third-World countries, the lawfare was executed by clumsy but politically loyal amateurs, relying on home-turf advantage to overcome their weak cases. And speaking of democracy, lawfare to date has also been defeated (convictions alone don’t matter when the goal is political destruction) by some judges still willing to uphold the ideals of a fair system and dismiss unfair charges.

With lawfare essentially failing off the table, it is time to demonize Trump to create a manifesto for the mentally ill American who will carry out the grim final round.

The New Republic has duly warned us that “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election”—if Trump wins, American democracy is over. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have,” Trump himself said, and he would never joke or exaggerate, right?

In another number from the New Republic, a writer concluded,

The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia. Trump will… use every means available to achieve an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style “Don’t Say Gay laws,” license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and “dual sovereignty” arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table.

“Putin does what [Trump] would like to do,” Hillary Clinton has said. “Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists into exile, rule without any check or balance. That’s what Trump really wants.” 

In short, says the Washington Post, “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

And what politics of fear round-up would be complete without Trump’s misquoted out-of-context “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country”? Somewhere after that comes a mention from the left of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used since the Founders created it. There are a lot of grievances, triggers, and dog-whistles to hit.

An element of “Trump is Hitler” has always been missing, Trump’s own version of Mein Kampf. Hitler was famous for writing (from prison) exactly what he planned to do once he gained power. Now there is Project 2025, a document disavowed numerous times by Trump that pundits from the left (and the Democratic candidate herself) nevertheless claim is Trump’s nefarious blueprint for a second term. Trump’s team did not write Project 2025, and he has not cited it in his speeches, but it is stuck to him by the Left like tar.

And as a call to arms, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said that democracies, with their strong protections for civil liberties and the rule of law, don’t drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, they die slowly, incrementally, poisoned at the roots by the fear and anger instilled by demagogues—like Trump. Adam Kinzinger wrote on X, “MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power.” For those who need more intellectual backup to calling for murder, welcome Jonathan Chait, who wrote, “Donald Trump Is a Threat to Democracy, and Saying So Is Not Incitement.”

It’s OK, they seem to say, because Trump asked for it. “He’s worth killing” is the broader message. “I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents,” said Hillary Clinton. “We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.”

Unlike in the Third World, there will be no hand-picked assassin here. There is also no conspiracy per se to assassinate Trump. Instead, the left bets that if they send out enough signals, someone mentally ill enough in armed America will do what they want in their hearts. It is the patriotic thing to do, like time-travelers smiting baby Hitler. A jihad.

The left is too coordinated in its words and actions not to know what it is doing. Trump knows it; during his debate with Harris he remarked that he took a bullet to the head for some of her remarks that he is anti-democratic. Trump’s would-be assassin knows it, claiming that “democracy is on the ballot.” 

What happens next sadly seems to revolve around luck. It was by hair’s breadth away in Butler, Pennsylvania, that the Trump rally did not end with a “back and to the left” blood- and brain-splattered scenario. It was luck that a lone Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel poking out of cover from the perimeter of the Mar-a-Lago golf course and fired to prevent the killer from getting off a round. Next time? In the face of so many sparks being thrown into so much tinder, how much more luck can Trump count on to see him through to Election Day?