The Left’s War on Donald Trump Continues
The assassination attempts on Donald Trump are starting to pile up. On Sunday, Trump providentially evaded the efforts of another individual set to kill him in as many months.
Ryan Wesley Routh waited for 12 hours by the sixth hole at The Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, for Trump to get into range of his AK-47. Fortunately, he was foiled. A member of the Secret Service noticed the muzzle of Routh’s gun and reportedly fired. Routh fled the scene but was eventually caught due to the quick thinking of a woman who took pictures of his license plate.
This comes just over two months after Trump barely evaded the bullets of a shooter during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Thomas Matthew Crooks nearly killed the former president, only missing by millimeters as Trump miraculously turned his head at just the right moment.
Unfortunately, as American Reformer’s own Josh Abbotoy and Timon Cline wrote following the first unsuccessful attempt on Trump’s life, “Expect the left to become only more desperate after this past weekend.” And that’s exactly what’s happening. With the election less than 50 days away, the danger is mounting: Trump’s life is at ever-increasing risk due to the Left’s rhetorical campaign of dehumanization.
As with the multiple breakdowns that occurred with Trump’s Secret Service protection in July, our top national security institutions should be looking hard at themselves after this assassination attempt. It’s almost a near-certainty that Routh was known to both the FBI and CIA. In 2002, he would have gotten on the FBI’s radar after barricading himself in a business and having a three-hour standoff with police. Additionally, he was fanatical about trying to fight for Ukraine, which would’ve sent up a smoke signal for the CIA. Routh even tried to get U.S.-trained Afghans to fight, a plan that even the Ukrainians didn’t buy.
I’m sure that the media is loath to report that Routh is a registered Democrat. He’s a very public Harris supporter and has a Biden-Harris bumper sticker on his truck. Though he supposedly voted for Trump in 2016, he’s made 19 donations to the Democratic PAC ActBlue, because, as he posted on social media, “democracy was on the ballot” in 2024. Routh even co-authored an e-book telling Iran that they are “free to assassinate Trump”—a book that is still available for purchase on Amazon as of this writing.
The problem is that Routh’s over-the-top hatred of Trump is indistinguishable from what’s being said by Democrats and amplified by the media every day.
This is not to argue that Harris, Walz, or other Democrats of national significance have called for open violence on Trump. But it is to point out that their years-long campaign of dehumanizing Trump through countless speeches, remarks, interviews, and social media posts has helped prepare the ground for such attacks to take place.
The Trump campaign posted example after example of the eliminationist rhetoric that regularly spews forth from the mouths of Democrats, including President Biden. Variations on “Trump is an existential threat to our democracy” regularly flood news broadcasts and op-ed columns. Occasionally, we even get a glimpse of unfiltered opinion from our elites. Rachel Vindman, the wife of regime favorite Alexander Vindman, posted (and later deleted) the following comment: “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.”
When the Left endlessly compares Trump to Hitler and other tyrants, as did The New Republic before the first assassination attempt, it’s not all that surprising that a deranged person decides to act after seeing and hearing that message over and over again.
This is far different than when the Left, aided by the media, tried to pin the shooting of former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin for using targets in campaign material. There’s a clear tradition of using martial rhetoric and military metaphors in politics. But the Left’s 24/7 campaign against Trump is of a very different nature. With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, there has never been a person in U.S. history who has been the target of non-stop vitriol by the media, a political party, and elites that Trump has experienced since 2016.
The ruling class is busy obliterating the firewalls that separate typical campaign rhetoric from dangerous speech that targets the lives of those running for office. As R.R. Reno has written of this mindset, “All means are justified to prevent threats to their rule—because only they are the responsible and right-thinking people, and they must rule.” There’s a reason why 28% of Democrats believe that if Donald Trump was assassinated on Sunday, America would be better off.
And this view has been ceaselessly promoted by the media. According to the same people who in every other context think that putting any blame on a victim is a war crime, the media has made it clear that Trump and J.D. Vance are at least partially responsible for the latest assassination attempt.
The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and other outlets maintained that Trump and Vance riled up Routh with their divisive rhetoric, thus causing him to act. The New York Times’s Peter Baker wrote, “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him.” But as Heather Mac Donald rightly countered in response, we are supposed to believe that Trump should be blamed while the Left gets off scot-free? “Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy,” Mac Donald facetiously wrote, “has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.”
As usual, evangelical elites joined the media’s gaslighting campaign. In a glaring irony, Russell Moore went on Morning Joe on Monday to talk about the threat of violence that Trump had purportedly created due to his remark that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating cats and dogs. During his nearly 11-minute segment on MSNBC, Moore didn’t say a word about the assassination attempt. Kristin Du Mez retweeted accounts that falsely blamed the bomb threats in Springfield on Trump. (Ohio Governor Mike DeWine dismissed that lazy talking point, saying that all 33 threats were hoaxes perpetrated by overseas actors.) And Thabiti Anyabwile erroneously said that both of Trump’s assassins “came from the right.”
The problem is that the cartoonish world that the ruling class and their evangelical courtiers think they live in bears little resemblance to the world as it is. For this crew, it’s simultaneously always 1861, 1941, and 1961. Thousands of KKK members are on horseback, forever running toward neighborhoods filled with black people. Another Hitler is always on the verge of rising. And Bull Connor is perpetually on every street corner, shouting into a megaphone as water hoses are turned on minorities.
But this is a juvenile way to think about politics. Posting comic book covers and using characters from the Avengers, Star Wars, and Harry Potter to make political points should be seen as the equivalent of making crayon drawings and playing with building blocks—what children do rather than how adults should think about the world. This simplistic, Manichean morality tale of pure good versus pure evil that the elites tell themselves is a reflection of a deep bankruptcy. It is a clear advertisement that they are not serious people and ought not be listened to. And it’s even more evidence that the seriousness, clarity, and depth of the Reformers’ political theology towers over the sophomoric 21st century evangelical political theology peddled by our so-called elites.
In a masterful post on X, J.D. Vance focused on the real political problems our country is facing. He argued that in order to have a free country, we must promote free speech and, of course, condemn speech that incites violence. Furthermore, Vance called on Americans to reject the campaign of censorship being promoted by the media and the Left. Censoring political debate, in which those with non-approved opinions get attacked mercilessly, is the way of tyrants. “It’s a form of moral blackmail,” Vance wrote, “designed not to make anyone safe but to shut everyone up.”
Reject censorship, and reject the lies being pushed by the media. Even more—reject the Left’s dehumanization campaign against Donald Trump.
