As much as I despise Trump, assassination is not the way to be rid of him. That's how banana republics change leaders. It's how some punk decides things for an entire citizenry based on the white noise inside his skull. It's how political animosity is made even worse.
Political assassinations don't work when done by individuals. Three major political assassinations in the second half of the twentieth century involved Israel.
President Sadat was killed because of the peace deal with Israel (and other reasons that angered the Muslim Brotherhood), but the deal remained intact. Bobby Kennedy was killed for supporting Israel, but America stayed pro-Israel, and his son is also a strong supporter, even though it's less popular now among the anti-establishment crowd he appeals to.
Yigal Amir killed Rabin, and many say it ruined the peace process, but that's not true. The assassination didn't stop Ehud Barak from offering the Palestinians the Temple Mount, half of Jerusalem, and the entire West Bank five years later. They refused and started sending suicide bombers to buses and restaurants, showing they never accepted Israel. Rabin's assassin changed nothing.
I deliberately didn't mention the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, which destroyed the chance for peace between Israel and Lebanon, because it wasn't carried out by individuals but by Syria. These assassinations are part of a military struggle that can, of course, succeed as it did then.
Excellent piece Rich. As usual, but very much a needed mental pallette cleanser. Much as I hate DJT and have wanted him to die for years, I'd even less want to live in a country where assassinations are a regular part of political life.
I'd say the biggest reason why assassintypes don't kill like they used to is also that it's very difficult to both psychologically prime oneself to commit murder and to have enough restraint to not let anyone in on one's plans. People complained for years about Omar Mateen's bad temper, including his ex-wife Sitora, who let him for domestic abuse. But he cast a wide net with his rages. He hadn't decided to attack Pulse until the night before he carried out his attack, which we know as his his later wife Noor's story about scoping it out earlier was contradicted by their GPS data. If he zoned his rage onto a specific target, like Obama or Trump or Dubya, he almost assuredly would've been stopped left of boom and in a neighboring cell with Umar Abdulmutallab in ADX.
And if social media existed in the '60s, I'm also certain Lee Harvey Oswald would've tipped the Secret Service long before he found his book depository. He was insufferable. Even guilting the Soviets into letting him extend his stay in Moscow by attempting suicide after they rejected his citizenship application. He absolutely would've posted a murder manifesto at some point before November '63.
Other than the fading of anarchism increased gun control may play a part. In the UK Farage inspires something similar to TDS on the left, but the closest to what just happened to Trump was a leftist throwing bricks at him from a building site during a campaign rally. Knives and bricks just aren't as effective as guns.
The UK didn't seem to have many assassinations back then their gun laws were lax either. There was M'Naghten, who has a legal defense rule named after him because it wasn't regarded as a bigger problem they needed to crack down on (perhaps because he shot a much more minor figure than he intended).
Even before the school shooting in the 90s that caused the change in gun laws, there weren't that many guns lying around.
The UK has fought very serious political assassination attempts, like the Brighton bombing in which the IRA blew up an entire building containing most of the British government. Five MPs were killed and over 30 people were injured. Thatcher emerged from the rubble alive.
This does not seem to have been political violence though. Shooter was a typical gun-obssed incel, rejected by everyone including his school's own shooting club for being too much of a loner/weirdo, working a minimum wage job as a dishwasher. The rally near his house was just an opportune time for him to try to get famous and show he was more important than what all other evidence would shown. This was more akin to school shootings and other instances of incel rage, not something done against a political enemy. Angry incels + availability of weapons of war = this shit will happen.
There are not actually enough politically radicalized people in the US that they are willing to have their head blown off or life in prison to try to take out a political candidate. That takes a depressive psychotic person willing to throw away their life for at least some post mortem fame.
If you want to be mean, one could argue today's radicals are just all talks and badge grifters, posturing themselves as revolutionary heroes comfortably sit on their mom's basement. Anarchists shooting kings were surely far braver.
Correct. Lots of fantasies about being the brave revolutionary and doing battle, no doubt to a soundtrack, in their mind. The actual shooters are always psychopathic people no one liked or paid attention to, and they don't care who their target is...children or celebrities... so long as it gets attention.
"there is nothing inconsistent in believing both that Trump is a threat to democracy, and that one shouldn’t try to assassinate him."
There rather is, given their premises. As you've already stated their hysterical claims clearly: They believe that Trump is a threat to democracy and that all legal means of stopping him have already failed. Therefore only ILLEGAL means remain. Frankly, even many of those have already been exhausted to little or no success as the legally dubious surveillance, raids, 'leaks', and lawfare have barely scratched the Teflon Don. Trump is the current favorite to win and the quoted article is not wrong in its logic that sane people do not sit around doing nothing in the face of a 50%+ chance of irrecoverable calamity. Unless your contention is that they ought to rely on voter fraud and election rigging (admittedly more peaceful ways of preventing a 2nd Trump tenure, if no less illegal, unethical, and undemocratic than assassination), you've failed to articulate exactly what response to the supposed "threat to democracy" you want his opponents to embrace instead, that doesn't amount to a knowingly futile "for the honor of the flag" parting shot on the way down to defeat. Either Trump is not the threat they say that he is, or extreme, even extrajudicial measures such as this, become justified responses to such an existential threat after all less extreme measures have failed. "All conceivable means" indeed.
"The process is more important than the outcome" only holds true if that outcome doesn't destroy the process. For anyone who genuinely believes that a Trump win would be the last election ever and the start of an authoritarian regime legitimately Hitlerian...
The Dems have many options other than assassination. The logical thing to do would be to run a candidate who would stand a better chance of winning than dementia-era Biden. But political parties are creatures of craven individuals with extraordinary power to dictate the function of institutions based on their own selfishness. Hence why DJT also refused to step aside, or even attempt to debate anybody else in the party and give the Reps an easier victory of their own, after his losing of the popular vote twice in a row. The days of "the party" mattering in terms of the many rather than the leader have been over for some time.
I'm honestly curious who you think the Democrats have with a better chance of winning if they switch at this point. Harris has even lower poll numbers, Obama (Michelle) already stated that she isn't interested, Newsom has a terrible record at the State level to defend... Of the many articles I've seen from left leaning publications supporting the idea that Biden needs to step aside for the good of the country, NONE of them actually floated any names as to who they would suggest to replace him. Even Sanders seems to have lost his shine with the lefty base (and frankly wouldn't draw much of a contrast from Biden if the intent is to avoid being labeled as a senile old white man).
Likewise, polling on the Republican side pretty consistently showed Trump with better numbers than anyone else running (except sometimes Haley, but that was largely driven by Democrats deliberately trying to artificially boost her).
Despite the relatively high percentage of voters who didn't want this matchup, they also didn't collectively settle on anyone else either.
Who cares what the odds are! A literal dementia patient should not be trusted with important shit, least of all the most important job in the fucking world. Biden should be removed because his being in power is a fundamental, fatal abdication and comporomise of responsibility the likes of which should not be tolerated for any reason. And with him being gone, the Dems at bare minimum would no longer have to call a deer a horse to the public's face just to have any hope of avoiding their worst drubbing since '88. (A task at which they'll still fail, but there may at least be a small chance against it, as opposed to winning, to which there's no longer any meaningful chance of avoiding.)
People making life or death decisions care what the odds are. Generally, people making ANY decision with notable consequences care what the odds are. They've been quite clear that many of them would happily vote a comatose Biden into office (I believe one celebrity memorably said he'd vote for Biden's brain in a jar) over Trump.
As far as they're concerned, "the most important job in the ducking world" isn't actually running the country (Biden clearly hasn't been doing that for months, if not years, and they're still mostly satisfied with what the Party Insiders and Deep State have done in the meantime), the most important job to them is 'STOP TRUMP!'; a task that Dementia Joe nonetheless still has (relatively) higher (slim) odds of achieving than anyone else in their pathetically shallow candidate pool.
OTOH, almost any random shooter has MUCH better odds when firing within 150 yards at a (nearly) motionless target, they've spent years taking over federal law enforcement agencies, they would LOVE to have the pretext to crack down on civilian gun ownership, and they've already done the propaganda groundwork of painting Republicans as a bunch of extremists, fascists, and "domestic terrorists" just waiting to overthrow the government so they can impose a Christofascist tyranny that will 'disappear' the gays with their roving "Death Squads". Seriously, they spent months labeling unarmed people peacefully wandering the Capital long after the officials had left as an "armed insurrection". They WANT to see half the country finally start breaking some laws, ANY laws, so they have an excuse to imprison their political opponents.
There are a couple replies to your line of argument. The first is to point out that it isn't enough to believe Trump is a credible threat to democracy in order to justify violence. You also have to believe the violence has a decent chance of saving democracy. I don't think that bar has been cleared. Trump's murder, especially if it came at the hands of his opposition, would delegitimize the democratic process in the eyes of at least half the country. This would make them far more amenable to any of Trump's aspiring replacements. The end result would probably be democracy being even more threatened by someone else.
Secondly, the phrase "threat to democracy" is a little ambiguous. Let's imagine that violence is justified to stop a politician if there is an x% chance they will permanently destroy democracy. Someone like Hitler or Stalin would be comfortably over that threshold. Imagine that a typical presidential candidate has an x-30% chance of destroying democracy, while Trump has an x-15% chance of doing so. I think it's worthy of concern that he's much more dangerous than the average candidate, even if he is still far from the threshold where violence is justified to stop him.
To the left, "destroying democracy" means wanting policies the left opposes.
Trump, or any successor, is not going to bring about fascism, authoritarianism or dictatorship in the US. It's this hysterical, mindless frenzied thinking that fomented the assassination attempt. You even David From basically saying Trump brought it onto himself and he deserved it. It's TDS.
There's no such thing as TDS. The reason people freak out so much about Trump is that he really is significantly worse than a typical politician by most metrics. He has done and said some very concerning things that actually attempted to subvert the democratic process, such as:
1. Trying to get Mike Pence to throw out the electoral college votes on January 6th. Everyone makes a big deal about that protest Trump organized that got out of control, but the real giant attack on democracy that day was him telling Pence to not count the votes to certify the election.
2. Trying to get fraudulent certificates of ascertainment stating he had won in areas where he had lost.
3. Falsely accusing the election of being fraudulent merely because he lost and he wanted to win.
4. Voicing admiration for the ability of dictators to get more things done because they don't have to deal with checks and balances. This includes stating that he wants to act as a dictator for the first day of office.
Oh yeah 1/6 was terrible but those BLM riots you supported were the voice of the marginalized and an outcry against white supremacy. Riot, loot, burn. No big deal. A riot at Congress and it's the world falling apart.
As for 4, Democrats and progressives have also voiced admiration for dictatorships like China for their ability to execute more quickly than the US. Remember China's COVID and mask policy. All you progressives were complaining about not being allowed to lock people in their homes to "stop the spread."
I specifically said that what was truly terrible about January 6 was Trump ordering Pence to not count the votes, not the riot.
Trump has consistently shown greater admiration for dictators than the average American politician from either party. In particular, he has shown admiration even for their ability to "get things done" in "normal" situations, not just in rare emergencies like the pandemic.
It's certainly true that other politicians sometimes do and say the kind of bad stuff Trump does. But he's more consistent about it and turns it up to 11. There is no TDS. Trump is a truly deranged person, some of us just recognize that.
They DO believe that violence has a decent chance of "saving democracy". They also believe that ANY Republican winning the White House will be "the End of Democracy", permanently. They describe every election now as "an existential threat!". An "existential" threat, by definition, is a lethal threat, and therefore makes lethal force in response a justified proportional response.
That's what they've been saying for years. Every single Republican gets labeled "far right extremist", regardless of their actual policy positions (Seriously, the 2024 GOP platform reads like a moderate Democrat platform from the Blue Dog Democrats a few decades ago, while Trump has specifically disavowed any intent to follow the classically conservative Heritage 2025 plan). There is little to no correlation anymore between the positions of any (R) candidate and the absurd hyperbole Democrats will attempt to slander them with. If you aren't 100% with the far left progressives, you're labeled a fascist by the Democrat Party and 'mainstream' media.
As for "delegitimizing the democratic process in the eyes of half the country", that's already baked in. Dems don't consider any election they lost as legitimate anymore. There isn't a single institution of our government they haven't declared illegitimate any time it does anything that benefits Republicans. Seriously, they were declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate even over 9-0 UNANIMOUS rulings that didn't go the way they wanted. After how Dems bent and broke election laws, censored social media, and repeatedly threatened widespread riots if they lose, most Republicans are pretty sure that Dems rigged the last election and are trying to do it again.
I love leftists worrying about the right-wing extremist backlash that's coming for them. The assassination attempt is just a FN in the narrative that they are the true victims and the right is violent.
Anarchists keep blowing things up with dynamite for a while after WWI as well. And the KKK and leftists in the 60s and 70s used it too until some genius finally asked why you could just buy dynamite at the hardware store. Bombings were endemic and memetic. There were also the assassinations in the 1960s. As I've said before, human beings are vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys. Norms matter a lot.
Trump is indeed different from anyone else. He is a unique figure with no equal, and killing him would have destroyed an entire movement. Even J.D. Vance, the senator who shares similar views, is not Trump and does not embody the unique combination of extreme pragmatism, lack of religious fanaticism, and the blend of coarse character with moderate populist views that Trump has.
President Moïse of Haïti was assassinated a few years back, too. Though the subsequent news out of Haïti has been so much more grizzly that a mere presidential assassination barely registers next to "gangs of cannibals have taken over the country".
"agnostic" at https://akinokure.blogspot.com told me it was done to put the Bush wing of the party back in charge, and it succeeded. It might be the nuttiest thing I can recall him saying, but he came to embrace a lot of nutty ideas in the wake of Trump.
Rather than the First World War bringing an end to the trend of assassinations, in Japan they seem to have been more common in its wake, leading up to WW2. The US also started having more assassinations in the wake of JFK, with both RFK & MLK* being killed, multiple attempts on Gerald Ford, George Wallace being non-fatally wounded (thus inspiring Taxi Driver, in turn inspiring Hinckley to shoot Reagan). Into the 70s, plane hijackings seemed to bcomee the more popular activity for nutty people wanting to make a political statement. Perhaps because planes were less guarded than politicians.
*And when I first wrote that I forgot Malcolm X. If only he had been "Malcolm K" instead.
>Into the 70s, plane hijackings seemed to bcomee the more popular activity for nutty people wanting to make a political statement.
And bombings, as noted by the book "Days of Rage". “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI
Another obvious point is simply that throughout the 20th century, people got more serious about protecting political leaders, particularly post-Kennedy. (McKinley wasn't important enough, as it seems).
Trump's agents around him rushed in as they are supposed to do, and his counter-sniper team apparently did its job. But gosh, leaving that roof uncovered is going to cause some serious recriminations.
Yes, that petite woman who barely came up to his shoulders certainly did her job.
I didn't realize Trump was 6'3 until I saw all the pictures and wondered why Trump's head was head and shoulders above the Secret Service agents. His head was exposed.
That's a pretty big miss. Every time I've seen a picture of a celebrity flanked by security guards, they are always huge men. How does the SS not require similar statured men protecting a presidential candidate?
I cannot believe they had the female agent protecting Trump. Not sure if this is pure incompetence/cluelessness or DEI. Women shouldn't be guarding people up close like that.
Yes, I agree with the gist of your comment. Trump is a big guy, but some of his female guards seemed tiny in comparison. Even some of the guys were a little undersized.
I’d be fine with a height requirement tailored to the height of the protectee. Obviously, if a former NBA player who stands 6’10” tall wins the presidency, it’s gonna be hard to find people tall enough. But Trump is (allegedly) 6’3” tall, so we should be able to find a close detail of guards who are six feet tall or taller.
Note that this rule is theoretically gender-neutral, even if it has disparate impact. (Note the tie-in with Hanania.) Shorter guys like me would be excluded, and Amazonian women would be included, but life being what it is, the detail would end up almost all male. Chris Rufo also notes that they have different fitness standards for males and females, and I would support moving to a single (high) standard.
This would make it very difficult to have 30% women by 2030, the current DEI goal, but I personally think doing the job is more important. So I suspect that you and I agree.
Just need to look at the private security market to see what works. I bet Kim K doesn't have a female security guard protecting her, even a 6'2, muscled woman.
Gotta love the leftists who want different fitness standards for men and women while denying the reality of biological differences.
I disagree. We actually do need answer the thought experiment about baby hitler with a resounding "No!" Hitler didn't invent fascism, he certainly didn't invent anti-semitism. He DID make huge mistakes that lost the war for his kind. Europe was NOT done with intracontinental wars. It could have been much, much worse.
Nothing could have been worse than a war that left tens of millions dead and most of Eurasia under totalitarian dictatorship for the subsequent two generations. Hitler and Stalin were one-party-state dictators for whom no means of removal other than their deaths existed. Assasssinating them would have been both moral and beneficial at every stage. But such things bear no resemblance to the US, where even after a coup attempt we still nonetheless possess ample means to resolve our political disputes via nonviolence, barring our belonging to some revolutionary-terrorist organization which axiomatically rejects such things as farcical. Such forces are still marginal in US politics. (Though clearly much less so than they've been since the '70s.)
> Assasssinating them would have been both moral and beneficial at every stage
I think the point the Keith is making above is that it could have been worse. Hitler was exceptionally bad. But I suspect most counterfactuals imagine that if you stop Hilter, you stop the Nazis. What if instead you get a more competent Nazi? Depends what time this happens and who takes over in the internal party struggle ... but it is possible to consider alternative histories where the Nazi's are able to more successfully achieve their evil goals. In fact, moderating some of their ambitions might, ironically, might have made them more achievable by preventing things such as US entry in the war, or negotiated settlements that allowed for later attacks (such as with atomic weapons).
There were also a lot of assassinations in the Weimar Republic after WWI. The communist leaders Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were killed, as was the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau
I mentioned Japan, and I was going to interject that perhaps it was more common in Axis countries than Allied ones, but French premiere Paul Doumer was assassinated in 1932. There was an attempted shooting of FDR by an Italian bricklayer who seemed to share the view of those anarchist assassins on who was fair game. Huey Long was assassinated, but since he's remembered as a bad guy people don't see that as such a bad thing.
Yeah, I was going to mention Giuseppe Zangara (my memory had the surname right, not the forename) as someone who would be forgotten like Cook. My intestinally-based :) guess is that of 20th C assassinations that came close (e.g. shooter having a good shot but missing) that was one of the more significant, though perhaps second to Fanny Kaplan (Lenin, August 1918: AFAIK Kaplan came by far the closest to succeeding of the many attempts).
Positions of power with their pomp and ritual are actual magic. This is why so many of the successful assassinations have ties to their own ritual organizations.
Or are so divorced from society through isolation or actual schizo that the memetic psychic force doesn't act on them.
In this line I think the decline of assassinations after world War I was the fact that the aristocratic model had stopped having much broader psychic authority quite a while earlier and that was the last gasp.
Democracy is both a process and ritual, but it feels like we've lost the process part, and I just left the ritual, and it is not currently establishing executives that have the consent of the governed. Lots of psychic disonance, 1920s, 1970s, the wheel is turning.
Trump just conjured one of the deepest animal spirits
Why so few assassinations? Most slaves are rather content with their form of government masters and political deprivation. Being truly free would be far too much work for the majority.
You mean like a purely metaphorical slave, as opposed to someone who's forced to work for no wage on a property their entire life, can have their children taken from them with no recourse, and would get torn apart by dogs if they try to leave the property? Maybe.
As much as I despise Trump, assassination is not the way to be rid of him. That's how banana republics change leaders. It's how some punk decides things for an entire citizenry based on the white noise inside his skull. It's how political animosity is made even worse.
Agreed. Murdering the prohibitive favorite in an election is an assault on democracy.
Political assassinations don't work when done by individuals. Three major political assassinations in the second half of the twentieth century involved Israel.
President Sadat was killed because of the peace deal with Israel (and other reasons that angered the Muslim Brotherhood), but the deal remained intact. Bobby Kennedy was killed for supporting Israel, but America stayed pro-Israel, and his son is also a strong supporter, even though it's less popular now among the anti-establishment crowd he appeals to.
Yigal Amir killed Rabin, and many say it ruined the peace process, but that's not true. The assassination didn't stop Ehud Barak from offering the Palestinians the Temple Mount, half of Jerusalem, and the entire West Bank five years later. They refused and started sending suicide bombers to buses and restaurants, showing they never accepted Israel. Rabin's assassin changed nothing.
I deliberately didn't mention the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, which destroyed the chance for peace between Israel and Lebanon, because it wasn't carried out by individuals but by Syria. These assassinations are part of a military struggle that can, of course, succeed as it did then.
Excellent piece Rich. As usual, but very much a needed mental pallette cleanser. Much as I hate DJT and have wanted him to die for years, I'd even less want to live in a country where assassinations are a regular part of political life.
I'd say the biggest reason why assassintypes don't kill like they used to is also that it's very difficult to both psychologically prime oneself to commit murder and to have enough restraint to not let anyone in on one's plans. People complained for years about Omar Mateen's bad temper, including his ex-wife Sitora, who let him for domestic abuse. But he cast a wide net with his rages. He hadn't decided to attack Pulse until the night before he carried out his attack, which we know as his his later wife Noor's story about scoping it out earlier was contradicted by their GPS data. If he zoned his rage onto a specific target, like Obama or Trump or Dubya, he almost assuredly would've been stopped left of boom and in a neighboring cell with Umar Abdulmutallab in ADX.
And if social media existed in the '60s, I'm also certain Lee Harvey Oswald would've tipped the Secret Service long before he found his book depository. He was insufferable. Even guilting the Soviets into letting him extend his stay in Moscow by attempting suicide after they rejected his citizenship application. He absolutely would've posted a murder manifesto at some point before November '63.
Other than the fading of anarchism increased gun control may play a part. In the UK Farage inspires something similar to TDS on the left, but the closest to what just happened to Trump was a leftist throwing bricks at him from a building site during a campaign rally. Knives and bricks just aren't as effective as guns.
The UK didn't seem to have many assassinations back then their gun laws were lax either. There was M'Naghten, who has a legal defense rule named after him because it wasn't regarded as a bigger problem they needed to crack down on (perhaps because he shot a much more minor figure than he intended).
Even before the school shooting in the 90s that caused the change in gun laws, there weren't that many guns lying around.
The UK has fought very serious political assassination attempts, like the Brighton bombing in which the IRA blew up an entire building containing most of the British government. Five MPs were killed and over 30 people were injured. Thatcher emerged from the rubble alive.
Well, Jo Cox was assassinated in 2016.
This does not seem to have been political violence though. Shooter was a typical gun-obssed incel, rejected by everyone including his school's own shooting club for being too much of a loner/weirdo, working a minimum wage job as a dishwasher. The rally near his house was just an opportune time for him to try to get famous and show he was more important than what all other evidence would shown. This was more akin to school shootings and other instances of incel rage, not something done against a political enemy. Angry incels + availability of weapons of war = this shit will happen.
There are not actually enough politically radicalized people in the US that they are willing to have their head blown off or life in prison to try to take out a political candidate. That takes a depressive psychotic person willing to throw away their life for at least some post mortem fame.
If you want to be mean, one could argue today's radicals are just all talks and badge grifters, posturing themselves as revolutionary heroes comfortably sit on their mom's basement. Anarchists shooting kings were surely far braver.
Correct. Lots of fantasies about being the brave revolutionary and doing battle, no doubt to a soundtrack, in their mind. The actual shooters are always psychopathic people no one liked or paid attention to, and they don't care who their target is...children or celebrities... so long as it gets attention.
Your description sounds eerily similar to Oswald.
"there is nothing inconsistent in believing both that Trump is a threat to democracy, and that one shouldn’t try to assassinate him."
There rather is, given their premises. As you've already stated their hysterical claims clearly: They believe that Trump is a threat to democracy and that all legal means of stopping him have already failed. Therefore only ILLEGAL means remain. Frankly, even many of those have already been exhausted to little or no success as the legally dubious surveillance, raids, 'leaks', and lawfare have barely scratched the Teflon Don. Trump is the current favorite to win and the quoted article is not wrong in its logic that sane people do not sit around doing nothing in the face of a 50%+ chance of irrecoverable calamity. Unless your contention is that they ought to rely on voter fraud and election rigging (admittedly more peaceful ways of preventing a 2nd Trump tenure, if no less illegal, unethical, and undemocratic than assassination), you've failed to articulate exactly what response to the supposed "threat to democracy" you want his opponents to embrace instead, that doesn't amount to a knowingly futile "for the honor of the flag" parting shot on the way down to defeat. Either Trump is not the threat they say that he is, or extreme, even extrajudicial measures such as this, become justified responses to such an existential threat after all less extreme measures have failed. "All conceivable means" indeed.
"The process is more important than the outcome" only holds true if that outcome doesn't destroy the process. For anyone who genuinely believes that a Trump win would be the last election ever and the start of an authoritarian regime legitimately Hitlerian...
The Dems have many options other than assassination. The logical thing to do would be to run a candidate who would stand a better chance of winning than dementia-era Biden. But political parties are creatures of craven individuals with extraordinary power to dictate the function of institutions based on their own selfishness. Hence why DJT also refused to step aside, or even attempt to debate anybody else in the party and give the Reps an easier victory of their own, after his losing of the popular vote twice in a row. The days of "the party" mattering in terms of the many rather than the leader have been over for some time.
I'm honestly curious who you think the Democrats have with a better chance of winning if they switch at this point. Harris has even lower poll numbers, Obama (Michelle) already stated that she isn't interested, Newsom has a terrible record at the State level to defend... Of the many articles I've seen from left leaning publications supporting the idea that Biden needs to step aside for the good of the country, NONE of them actually floated any names as to who they would suggest to replace him. Even Sanders seems to have lost his shine with the lefty base (and frankly wouldn't draw much of a contrast from Biden if the intent is to avoid being labeled as a senile old white man).
Likewise, polling on the Republican side pretty consistently showed Trump with better numbers than anyone else running (except sometimes Haley, but that was largely driven by Democrats deliberately trying to artificially boost her).
Despite the relatively high percentage of voters who didn't want this matchup, they also didn't collectively settle on anyone else either.
Who cares what the odds are! A literal dementia patient should not be trusted with important shit, least of all the most important job in the fucking world. Biden should be removed because his being in power is a fundamental, fatal abdication and comporomise of responsibility the likes of which should not be tolerated for any reason. And with him being gone, the Dems at bare minimum would no longer have to call a deer a horse to the public's face just to have any hope of avoiding their worst drubbing since '88. (A task at which they'll still fail, but there may at least be a small chance against it, as opposed to winning, to which there's no longer any meaningful chance of avoiding.)
People making life or death decisions care what the odds are. Generally, people making ANY decision with notable consequences care what the odds are. They've been quite clear that many of them would happily vote a comatose Biden into office (I believe one celebrity memorably said he'd vote for Biden's brain in a jar) over Trump.
As far as they're concerned, "the most important job in the ducking world" isn't actually running the country (Biden clearly hasn't been doing that for months, if not years, and they're still mostly satisfied with what the Party Insiders and Deep State have done in the meantime), the most important job to them is 'STOP TRUMP!'; a task that Dementia Joe nonetheless still has (relatively) higher (slim) odds of achieving than anyone else in their pathetically shallow candidate pool.
OTOH, almost any random shooter has MUCH better odds when firing within 150 yards at a (nearly) motionless target, they've spent years taking over federal law enforcement agencies, they would LOVE to have the pretext to crack down on civilian gun ownership, and they've already done the propaganda groundwork of painting Republicans as a bunch of extremists, fascists, and "domestic terrorists" just waiting to overthrow the government so they can impose a Christofascist tyranny that will 'disappear' the gays with their roving "Death Squads". Seriously, they spent months labeling unarmed people peacefully wandering the Capital long after the officials had left as an "armed insurrection". They WANT to see half the country finally start breaking some laws, ANY laws, so they have an excuse to imprison their political opponents.
There are a couple replies to your line of argument. The first is to point out that it isn't enough to believe Trump is a credible threat to democracy in order to justify violence. You also have to believe the violence has a decent chance of saving democracy. I don't think that bar has been cleared. Trump's murder, especially if it came at the hands of his opposition, would delegitimize the democratic process in the eyes of at least half the country. This would make them far more amenable to any of Trump's aspiring replacements. The end result would probably be democracy being even more threatened by someone else.
Secondly, the phrase "threat to democracy" is a little ambiguous. Let's imagine that violence is justified to stop a politician if there is an x% chance they will permanently destroy democracy. Someone like Hitler or Stalin would be comfortably over that threshold. Imagine that a typical presidential candidate has an x-30% chance of destroying democracy, while Trump has an x-15% chance of doing so. I think it's worthy of concern that he's much more dangerous than the average candidate, even if he is still far from the threshold where violence is justified to stop him.
To the left, "destroying democracy" means wanting policies the left opposes.
Trump, or any successor, is not going to bring about fascism, authoritarianism or dictatorship in the US. It's this hysterical, mindless frenzied thinking that fomented the assassination attempt. You even David From basically saying Trump brought it onto himself and he deserved it. It's TDS.
There's no such thing as TDS. The reason people freak out so much about Trump is that he really is significantly worse than a typical politician by most metrics. He has done and said some very concerning things that actually attempted to subvert the democratic process, such as:
1. Trying to get Mike Pence to throw out the electoral college votes on January 6th. Everyone makes a big deal about that protest Trump organized that got out of control, but the real giant attack on democracy that day was him telling Pence to not count the votes to certify the election.
2. Trying to get fraudulent certificates of ascertainment stating he had won in areas where he had lost.
3. Falsely accusing the election of being fraudulent merely because he lost and he wanted to win.
4. Voicing admiration for the ability of dictators to get more things done because they don't have to deal with checks and balances. This includes stating that he wants to act as a dictator for the first day of office.
Oh yeah 1/6 was terrible but those BLM riots you supported were the voice of the marginalized and an outcry against white supremacy. Riot, loot, burn. No big deal. A riot at Congress and it's the world falling apart.
As for 4, Democrats and progressives have also voiced admiration for dictatorships like China for their ability to execute more quickly than the US. Remember China's COVID and mask policy. All you progressives were complaining about not being allowed to lock people in their homes to "stop the spread."
You exemplify TDS. Denial, denial, denial.
I specifically said that what was truly terrible about January 6 was Trump ordering Pence to not count the votes, not the riot.
Trump has consistently shown greater admiration for dictators than the average American politician from either party. In particular, he has shown admiration even for their ability to "get things done" in "normal" situations, not just in rare emergencies like the pandemic.
It's certainly true that other politicians sometimes do and say the kind of bad stuff Trump does. But he's more consistent about it and turns it up to 11. There is no TDS. Trump is a truly deranged person, some of us just recognize that.
They DO believe that violence has a decent chance of "saving democracy". They also believe that ANY Republican winning the White House will be "the End of Democracy", permanently. They describe every election now as "an existential threat!". An "existential" threat, by definition, is a lethal threat, and therefore makes lethal force in response a justified proportional response.
That's what they've been saying for years. Every single Republican gets labeled "far right extremist", regardless of their actual policy positions (Seriously, the 2024 GOP platform reads like a moderate Democrat platform from the Blue Dog Democrats a few decades ago, while Trump has specifically disavowed any intent to follow the classically conservative Heritage 2025 plan). There is little to no correlation anymore between the positions of any (R) candidate and the absurd hyperbole Democrats will attempt to slander them with. If you aren't 100% with the far left progressives, you're labeled a fascist by the Democrat Party and 'mainstream' media.
As for "delegitimizing the democratic process in the eyes of half the country", that's already baked in. Dems don't consider any election they lost as legitimate anymore. There isn't a single institution of our government they haven't declared illegitimate any time it does anything that benefits Republicans. Seriously, they were declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate even over 9-0 UNANIMOUS rulings that didn't go the way they wanted. After how Dems bent and broke election laws, censored social media, and repeatedly threatened widespread riots if they lose, most Republicans are pretty sure that Dems rigged the last election and are trying to do it again.
I love leftists worrying about the right-wing extremist backlash that's coming for them. The assassination attempt is just a FN in the narrative that they are the true victims and the right is violent.
Anarchists keep blowing things up with dynamite for a while after WWI as well. And the KKK and leftists in the 60s and 70s used it too until some genius finally asked why you could just buy dynamite at the hardware store. Bombings were endemic and memetic. There were also the assassinations in the 1960s. As I've said before, human beings are vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys. Norms matter a lot.
Trump is indeed different from anyone else. He is a unique figure with no equal, and killing him would have destroyed an entire movement. Even J.D. Vance, the senator who shares similar views, is not Trump and does not embody the unique combination of extreme pragmatism, lack of religious fanaticism, and the blend of coarse character with moderate populist views that Trump has.
Haha. That veered off from what I expected in the last sentence.
You mean Alfonso XIII, not Alfonso XII (his father)
Thanks, sharp eye.
Abe in Japan. There was a near miss in Europe (can’t remember the country) just recently…
Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico, back in May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Robert_Fico
That’s the one, thanks…
President Moïse of Haïti was assassinated a few years back, too. Though the subsequent news out of Haïti has been so much more grizzly that a mere presidential assassination barely registers next to "gangs of cannibals have taken over the country".
Hinckley was a nut job trying to impress a lesbian. Nothing political about him.
"agnostic" at https://akinokure.blogspot.com told me it was done to put the Bush wing of the party back in charge, and it succeeded. It might be the nuttiest thing I can recall him saying, but he came to embrace a lot of nutty ideas in the wake of Trump.
Rather than the First World War bringing an end to the trend of assassinations, in Japan they seem to have been more common in its wake, leading up to WW2. The US also started having more assassinations in the wake of JFK, with both RFK & MLK* being killed, multiple attempts on Gerald Ford, George Wallace being non-fatally wounded (thus inspiring Taxi Driver, in turn inspiring Hinckley to shoot Reagan). Into the 70s, plane hijackings seemed to bcomee the more popular activity for nutty people wanting to make a political statement. Perhaps because planes were less guarded than politicians.
*And when I first wrote that I forgot Malcolm X. If only he had been "Malcolm K" instead.
>Into the 70s, plane hijackings seemed to bcomee the more popular activity for nutty people wanting to make a political statement.
And bombings, as noted by the book "Days of Rage". “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI
Five bombings every DAY in 1972.
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
Another obvious point is simply that throughout the 20th century, people got more serious about protecting political leaders, particularly post-Kennedy. (McKinley wasn't important enough, as it seems).
Trump's agents around him rushed in as they are supposed to do, and his counter-sniper team apparently did its job. But gosh, leaving that roof uncovered is going to cause some serious recriminations.
Yes, that petite woman who barely came up to his shoulders certainly did her job.
I didn't realize Trump was 6'3 until I saw all the pictures and wondered why Trump's head was head and shoulders above the Secret Service agents. His head was exposed.
Yes, there is that. Obviously, the Protective Detail, or the part of it that's close to the President, needs a height requirement.
There's also the agent who couldn't seem to reholster her sidearm.
That's a pretty big miss. Every time I've seen a picture of a celebrity flanked by security guards, they are always huge men. How does the SS not require similar statured men protecting a presidential candidate?
I cannot believe they had the female agent protecting Trump. Not sure if this is pure incompetence/cluelessness or DEI. Women shouldn't be guarding people up close like that.
Yes, I agree with the gist of your comment. Trump is a big guy, but some of his female guards seemed tiny in comparison. Even some of the guys were a little undersized.
I’d be fine with a height requirement tailored to the height of the protectee. Obviously, if a former NBA player who stands 6’10” tall wins the presidency, it’s gonna be hard to find people tall enough. But Trump is (allegedly) 6’3” tall, so we should be able to find a close detail of guards who are six feet tall or taller.
Note that this rule is theoretically gender-neutral, even if it has disparate impact. (Note the tie-in with Hanania.) Shorter guys like me would be excluded, and Amazonian women would be included, but life being what it is, the detail would end up almost all male. Chris Rufo also notes that they have different fitness standards for males and females, and I would support moving to a single (high) standard.
This would make it very difficult to have 30% women by 2030, the current DEI goal, but I personally think doing the job is more important. So I suspect that you and I agree.
Just need to look at the private security market to see what works. I bet Kim K doesn't have a female security guard protecting her, even a 6'2, muscled woman.
Gotta love the leftists who want different fitness standards for men and women while denying the reality of biological differences.
I think the main point should be there is very nearly never any justification for this. I think Hitler and Stalin may be the notable exceptions.
The pox is on both houses, to have brought rhetoric to such a point and such a temp that such a thing is even contemplated.
I’m really hoping this was a deranged psycho lone wolf.
I disagree. We actually do need answer the thought experiment about baby hitler with a resounding "No!" Hitler didn't invent fascism, he certainly didn't invent anti-semitism. He DID make huge mistakes that lost the war for his kind. Europe was NOT done with intracontinental wars. It could have been much, much worse.
Nothing could have been worse than a war that left tens of millions dead and most of Eurasia under totalitarian dictatorship for the subsequent two generations. Hitler and Stalin were one-party-state dictators for whom no means of removal other than their deaths existed. Assasssinating them would have been both moral and beneficial at every stage. But such things bear no resemblance to the US, where even after a coup attempt we still nonetheless possess ample means to resolve our political disputes via nonviolence, barring our belonging to some revolutionary-terrorist organization which axiomatically rejects such things as farcical. Such forces are still marginal in US politics. (Though clearly much less so than they've been since the '70s.)
> Assasssinating them would have been both moral and beneficial at every stage
I think the point the Keith is making above is that it could have been worse. Hitler was exceptionally bad. But I suspect most counterfactuals imagine that if you stop Hilter, you stop the Nazis. What if instead you get a more competent Nazi? Depends what time this happens and who takes over in the internal party struggle ... but it is possible to consider alternative histories where the Nazi's are able to more successfully achieve their evil goals. In fact, moderating some of their ambitions might, ironically, might have made them more achievable by preventing things such as US entry in the war, or negotiated settlements that allowed for later attacks (such as with atomic weapons).
There were also a lot of assassinations in the Weimar Republic after WWI. The communist leaders Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were killed, as was the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau
I mentioned Japan, and I was going to interject that perhaps it was more common in Axis countries than Allied ones, but French premiere Paul Doumer was assassinated in 1932. There was an attempted shooting of FDR by an Italian bricklayer who seemed to share the view of those anarchist assassins on who was fair game. Huey Long was assassinated, but since he's remembered as a bad guy people don't see that as such a bad thing.
Huey Long’s assassination was due to a personal beef.
The assassin was the son-in-law of one of Long's political opponents, whom Long had just gerrymandered.
I recall Steve Sailer had a joke about one Texan having assassinated both JFK & MLK because his wife slept with both.
Yeah, I was going to mention Giuseppe Zangara (my memory had the surname right, not the forename) as someone who would be forgotten like Cook. My intestinally-based :) guess is that of 20th C assassinations that came close (e.g. shooter having a good shot but missing) that was one of the more significant, though perhaps second to Fanny Kaplan (Lenin, August 1918: AFAIK Kaplan came by far the closest to succeeding of the many attempts).
Positions of power with their pomp and ritual are actual magic. This is why so many of the successful assassinations have ties to their own ritual organizations.
Or are so divorced from society through isolation or actual schizo that the memetic psychic force doesn't act on them.
In this line I think the decline of assassinations after world War I was the fact that the aristocratic model had stopped having much broader psychic authority quite a while earlier and that was the last gasp.
Democracy is both a process and ritual, but it feels like we've lost the process part, and I just left the ritual, and it is not currently establishing executives that have the consent of the governed. Lots of psychic disonance, 1920s, 1970s, the wheel is turning.
Trump just conjured one of the deepest animal spirits
Why so few assassinations? Most slaves are rather content with their form of government masters and political deprivation. Being truly free would be far too much work for the majority.
You mean like a purely metaphorical slave, as opposed to someone who's forced to work for no wage on a property their entire life, can have their children taken from them with no recourse, and would get torn apart by dogs if they try to leave the property? Maybe.
Self government is underrated and rarely practiced.