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If Democrats didn’t believe they’d put Donald Trump in an assassin’s crosshairs the first time, they have no excuse for pleading ignorance now.
Ryan Routh, the suspect who hid in the bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club waiting for his shot at former ex-president — AK-47-style rifled at the ready, serial number filed off — wasn’t some 20-year-old without a political paper trail, like the first would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks.
Routh, 58, “frequently posted about politics” on X and other social media, had a Biden-Harris sticker on his truck, “and exclusively donated to Democratic candidates and causes dating back to 2019,” The Post reports.
He even featured in a New York Times story last year highlighting his efforts to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight against Russia in Ukraine.
Willing to fight in Ukraine himself — though the Ukrainians didn’t want him or his dubious recruits — Routh wanted to be a man of action, and he was prepared to kill for a cause.
But if the cause of democracy in Ukraine was worth killing for, what about the safety of democracy right here in America?
Routh took both literally and seriously Democrats and progressives who say Trump is a threat to America’s institutions and the rule of law itself.
“DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose,” Routh wrote in a tweet to President Biden in April.
You can’t lose if your opponent is dead — and if democracy itself is in danger, what conclusion can a desperate man of action draw?
Instead of moderating their rhetoric, Trump’s critics only doubled down after the first assassination attempt.
Days after the shooting, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project was again comparing Trump to Hitler.
On July 19, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich called Trump “an existential danger to our democracy.”
As recently as last week’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris accused Trump of “attacking the foundations of our democracy.”
Democrats cut Trump no slack for calling on his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” on Jan. 6, 2021, when some of them ran amok and invaded the Capitol.
But Trump’s enemies don’t hold themselves to the same standard, when their own apocalyptic language incites a man like Routh to plan political murder.
A man with a gun who wants to stop Vladimir Putin might well think slaying Trump would save lives — if, as Democrats and liberals in the media say, Trump is Putin’s stooge and would let him do whatever he wants to Ukraine.
The political climate that inspired Routh encourages others like him.
The media have been recklessly uncritical of the incendiary characterizations that Trump’s opponents — and many members of the media itself — have employed for years.
Listening to the Democrats and watching MSNBC, a terrified man or woman might think the country is on the brink of dictatorship, and if ever there was a time when for pre-emptive violence, it must be now.
For Democrats to denounce political violence while leading their supporters to think that freedom is finished if Trump wins isn’t just hypocritical, it’s culpable.
Progressives have to find a way to argue against Trump without giving ammunition to the paranoid, self-righteous, and impulsive.
Trump’s life is already in danger — just think about what happens if he wins.
On election night, what will the people convinced Trump is a dictator do?
This is the moment to bring the temperature down.
It should have happened after the former president almost lost his life to an assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania.
But little changed after that horrific incident: Democrats certainly didn’t treat it anything like January 6.
They apparently aren’t examining their consciences now, either.
Rachel Vindman, sister-in-law of the Democrats’ nominee for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District — and the wife of Alexander Vindman, a key figure in the first impeachment effort against President Trump in 2019 — tweeted after Routh’s attempted ambush of Trump, “No ears were harmed.”
An audience member, Corey Comperatore, was killed in Butler on July 13, and the GOP nominee came within an inch of death — is this something Democrats like the Vindmans find funny?
Too few Democrats take seriously the implications of their own words.
They act as if Trump’s intemperance excuses greater intemperance on their part.
If Trump goes too far — and sometimes he does — the Democrats have a duty not to go farther still, but to pull back.
Yet they haven’t, so Trump remains in assassins’ sights.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.