JOHN PODHORETZ: The Assassination Wish Fulfillment.
On Tuesday, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski introduced a report on the attempt by Garrett Haake, and then when the camera returned to her face, launched into a two-minute history (read off a teleprompter, so therefore pre-planned by the show’s producer and theoretically approved in some fashion by MSNBC’s senior management) of all the times Trump has encouraged violence. She stitched together the genuinely disturbing (January 6 is “gonna be wild,” went the Trump tweet) with the jokey (Trump’s line about how he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it) and the transparently dishonest (that he supported the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017). The net result was a five-minute segment that, once again, was designed to make you think Trump was asking for it.
Let’s talk tachlis, as we say in Hebrew. Let’s talk straight. The reason so many people in this country seem determined not to consider the profound seriousness of a potential new age of assassination—a return to the destabilizing period that tormented this country and the West between JFK in 1963 and the Reagan/John Paul II attempts in 1981—is that it represents a dark wish fulfillment for so many people.
Donald Trump has refused to go away. He lost the 2020 election and wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t stand down, wouldn’t stand for a peaceful transition if there could be a chaotic and dangerous one. And the minute the next president began to serve, he began to run again—something no one in his position as ex-president had done from within his own party for 130 years. People hate him. They revile him. They fear him. They despise him. What they would like, more than anything, is for him to go away.
A great many people, and most of the nation’s elites, secretly or not so secretly wish they could see the result sought by would-be killers Routh and Cheeks. And while they know they must pay lip service to the fact that assassinations are bad and wrong and shocking and all that, they simply cannot muster up the emotion of horror. That’s what’s missing here from the coverage and discussions of these two attempts: Horror. Because they’re not horrified.
And they should be.
This is the darkest kind of fantasy, because it can be fulfilled—and the consequences would be unthinkably dangerous for the future of this country.
Those who wish Trump gone think the future with him in it as president for the second time will be a nightmare come true. But they do not begin to grasp the nature of the future in which Trump is removed from life and history with an act of violence that—though they would be outraged at the very suggestion—would be understood by history as an emanation of their dark, raging wish. It would be “the monkey’s paw” overtaking the world.
In the New York Post, Daniel McCarthy writes: Dems’ apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump only increased after first assassination attempt.
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.”
In response, America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight up reportage:
