From One Assassination Attempt to the Next: Mainstreaming Violence Against a President

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Same Old, Same Old: Target Trump

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt—this time in full view of the Washington press corps.

The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump. After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall—and that he might see possible violence outside it.

Indeed, protesters ringed the hotel. In grimly prescient fashion, the usual sort of crowd that night was channeling John Wilkes Booth—sic semper tyrannis—with placards reading “Death to Tyrants.”

They again almost got their wish.

All three of the would-be Trump shooters—along with Charlie Kirk’s murderer—fit the predictable profile of arrested-development, deranged leftists. They apparently sought to reify the popular Democrat hatred of Trump and his supporters, thereby imagining themselves entering the pantheon of revolutionary heroes.

So too, not long ago, did the would-be killer of Trump, Austin Tucker Martin, storm Mar-a-Lago in search of the absent president.

This time, the latest assassin, Cole Tomas Allen, left a manifesto repeating the old saw of Trump as “Hitler” and sought to kill the president and his cabinet members. Indeed, his incoherent screed read like a Petri dish of all the supposed sins of Trump, drawing on left-wing conspiracies about Russian collusion, lawfare myths, and the Epstein files.

Allen’s attempt was another fantasy of mass murdering, not unlike that of former Bernie Sanders campaign aide James T. Hodgkinson. He tried to take out Republican congressional leaders—wounding four, including House Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise—in a baseball game in Washington.

Other than the fact that the shooter nearly reached the doors to the auditorium, the Secret Service performed brilliantly—despite the Democratic effort to shut down the Department of Homeland Security.

Apparently, the Left’s mindset is that the security of elected officials—Trump especially—and of American citizens is not nearly as important as ensuring that foreign nationals who entered the country illegally are not legally returned to their countries of origin.

Assassins are motivated by all sorts of impulses, but certainly they do not act in a void.

From the trickle-down world of social media, the internet, and street theater, would-be killers absorb elite signals. This messaging becomes especially baleful when celebrities, governors, senators, and politicos amplify the claim that Trump is a fascist, a Nazi, a monster who is destroying the country and who must be stopped “by any means necessary.” Late-night comedians joke about past assassinations or assassination attempts; others have even claimed that Trump staged his first assassination attempt—and this one too!

So deep runs their hatred.

For over a decade, the Left has escalated its rhetoric of violence against Trump. Each politico, actor, celebrity, or billionaire seems to vie with the next in imagining new ways to kill or assault him.

Had that sort of rhetoric been directed at Obama or Biden, it would likely have put many of them in jail.

Count the Ways of Ending Trump?

So, how many ways have our elite leftists dreamed of beating up or murdering Trump?

Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and Robert De Niro all preferred punching him out. The now-infamous Kathy Griffin opted for beheading. So did Marilyn Manson.

The New York actors of Shakespeare in the Park turned Julius Caesar into Trump and staged his mass stabbing.

Mickey Rourke fancied clubbing; Snoop Dogg, shooting.

The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s choice, predictably, was poisoning.

“Comedian” George Lopez seconded the Iranian idea of a bounty killing. Pearl Jam offered the macabre vision of a bald eagle feeding on Trump’s corpse.

Larry Whilmore dreamed of suffocating Trump. Do we remember Moby and Madonna, who opted for blowing up Trump?

Rosie O’Donnell tried to be original by envisioning Trump being thrown off a cliff.

Johnny Depp joked about a John Wilkes Booth-style Trump assassination. Epstein friend and billionaire Reid Hoffman preened, “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”

Do we recall Joe Biden’s boast to his donors: “So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

In that regard, he-man Biden simply reverted to his earlier bullyboy boasts: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” and “The press always asks me, ‘Don’t I wish I were debating him? No, I wish we were in high school—I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.”

For all the praise of the Secret Service’s quick reaction, there is no excuse for the shooter having pranced into his hotel room with weapons and then meandering through the lobby armed. During the Biden presidency, the Secret Service was derelict in the first two close-call Trump assassination attempts.

Do we even remember that Biden denied Secret Service protection to candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. out of pique that his original Democrat challenger might weaken him and help put Trump back in the White House?

In 2024, January 6 Committee Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) crafted a law—ridiculously entitled the “Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED) Former Protectees Act”—to strip away Secret Service protection for then-former President Trump?

What was Thompson’s wish?

Hitler Trump?

Do we remember the New Republic cover where Trump was photoshopped as Adolf Hitler?

When called out, The New Republic doubled down, offering no apologies for its sick messaging.

“Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”

And so you encourage fellow leftist comrades like Cole Tomas Allen, Ryan Wesley Routh, and Thomas Matthew Crooks to “fight”—to eliminate your Trump-Hitler, allegedly another mass murderer of six million.

The now media-orphaned Joy Reid repeatedly and ad nauseam invoked Trump-Hitler memes: “Then let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” Rachel Maddow sermonized that she was studying Hitler in order to understand Trump.

Those who tried to kill Trump—and murdered Charlie Kirk—likely assumed they would eventually be canonized for ending the “Nazi” threat.

Indeed, Trump is now the only US president in history to be the target of three assassination attempts involving gunfire—with more than two years to go in his tenure as a target.

Since the Trump inauguration, ritualized left-wing street violence has become the norm—torching Tesla dealerships and cars, swarming ICE officers and facilities, and violent campus demonstrations on behalf of Hamas, usually characterized by overt anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment of Jews.

ICE officers are routinely attacked, pelted with rocks and bottles, and doxxed—the street-level version of the Democrat-elected officials who slander them as Nazis and fascists and promise to arrest them for the crime of enforcing federal immigration law, deliberately undermined by the Biden administration.

Piker Sickness

The latest left-wing heartthrob podcaster, the affluent Hasan Piker, just gave a gushing interview to affluent New York Times reporter Nadja Spiegelman and affluent New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino.

The two adoringly nodded as Piker matter-of-factly declared it was perfectly fine to rob stores—and anyone and anything that he arbitrarily defined as part of the oppressor class. “Yeah, I think it’s cool. We gotta get back to cool crimes like that. Bank robberies. Stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” So spoke the multimillionaire Piker.

More disturbingly, Piker has more or less suggested that the cold-blooded assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson, Brian Luigi Mangione, had understandable cause to kill—under the Marxist defense of “social murder” against purported enemies of the people.

I mention Piker because, earlier in 2025, at a public event, he referred—with a wink and nod—to killing Trump. Indeed, he declared, “Someone has to do it. See, when I say that, everyone knows exactly what I mean.”

Of course, they did on cue. His giddy interviewer, Taylor Lorenz, later highlighted Piker’s Trump threat in a video.

The Democrat Addiction

Post facto, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries commendably urged lowering the political temperature. One good way would have been for Jeffries not to have attacked Trump’s prior “Big Beautiful Bill” while posing with a baseball bat.

Or Jeffries might have politely advised congressional Democrat women not to cut a “Choose Your Fighter” video in which they shadowbox and throw punches to stop Trump. Or he might have advised his Democrat colleagues, such as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Bernie Sanders, and Jasmine Crockett, to stop smearing Trump as a fascist.

For years, we were lectured by the Left that “words matter,” in defense of their efforts to censor “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hurtful language.” But all that now appears to be abject projection, since it is the Left’s verbiage that has lowered the bar on the violence and encouraged killers to come out of the shadows to save us from supposed “fascists” and “Hitler” types.

Do we also recall the would-be assassin Nicholas John Roske, who joined left-wing protestors crowding the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices—a felony—and was planning to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the perennial target of hysterical left-wing attacks?

Not long ago, Minnesota governor and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz flew, in a time of war, to address a socialist, anti-American audience of Trump haters in Barcelona. Once there, Walz trashed Trump as a fascist—for the sixth time.

On two occasions, Walz’s running mate Kamala Harris referred to Trump as a fascist—this from Harris, who, in 2020, live on television and in the midst of the George Floyd riots in Washington, encouraged the demonstrations by saying, “They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop . . . They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day . . . Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.”

And they never did stop, Kamala.

In the last 22 months, Trump has survived three assassination attempts. At the present rate, sadly, we should expect another three or four efforts before he leaves office.

Why?

The hardcore left-wing establishment believes this sort of Hitler/Trump rhetoric, combined with the normalization of street violence, generates ever more protests, fuels anti-ICE fury, unites Congressional Democrats, and—most importantly—drives down Trump poll numbers. In their view, it is a lot more effective than merely outlining an alternative agenda.

So expect far more, not less, of this left-wing violent madness to come.