On Saturday, Thomas Matthew Crooks shot President Donald Trump while he delivered a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania. By the grace of God, the bullet only grazed his ear, giving President Trump probably the most defining moment of his legacy – he stood up, surrounded by Secret Service agents, with blood on the side of his face, and raised a fist raised in the air as he proclaimed, “Fight, fight, fight”.
Many Americans from both the left and the right immediately denounced what appeared to be an attempted political assassination of the former and likely future President. At its core, many blame an increasingly hot, vitriolic and toxic political climate spurred by an alarmist message that claims Trump will be a fascist dictator upon re-taking the presidency.
Now, it has yet to be determined if this was indeed a politically motivated assassination or a lone wolf attack, unconnected to President Trump’s politics. President Reagan’s assassin, for example, only wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster by shooting President Reagan.
Look on Twitter, and the first comment to most posts that denounce political violence is “he was a Republican.” This is of course ignoring that Crooks also donated to Act Blue, a left-wing political action committee.
But that misses the point entirely because even if Crooks acted completely independently of any political motivation, his attempt at President Trump’s life has revealed the danger of toxic alarmist politics. All you need to do is take a look at Trump’s detractors.
For example, Jacqueline Marshaw, a top staffer for a Mississippi Democrat tweeted that Crooks should have taken more shooting lessons so he wouldn’t have missed. Similarly, a Seattle journalist appeared to cheer the attempt by tweeting, “Make America aim again.” This is not to mention the countless TikTok and social media posts by younger Americans who lament that Trump survived.
But no one is more brazen in his support for Trump’s assassination than left-wing commentator Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, known as Destiny, who has earned the moniker “the left’s Ben Shapiro.”
In his own words, this is what Destiny said about the man who was murdered at the rally:
“F**k it, f**k the dude, the firefighter guy. F**k Trump, f**k the people that support [Trump]. I just want you to know, right? In case you are confused or whatever, if one of you were in the crowd and you are a conservative fan of mine and you get blown up or whatever, I am making fun of you the next day on Twitter.”
Destiny’s response to the assassination attempt is the embodiment of the problem in American politics, a small cohort of radicals who are willing to, or at the very least support the use of, political violence. Even if Thomas Matthew Crooks acted without a political purpose, there are far too many influential people and commentators who endorse the murder of an American President.
The truth is, anyone who genuinely threatens democracy and the American republic itself, deserves justice. There is a reason why treason is punishable by death in America. This is why the far-left cannot continue to claim that Trump is an existential threat to democracy but then ‘clarify’ that they only want to beat him at the ballot box. The two points are logically inconsistent.
Fortunately, this assassination attempt has reignited a sense of patriotism and recommitment to democratic values. Already, many left-wing politicians have backed off from calling President Trump a dictator and wished him well.
As President Biden said in his address to the nation: “We cannot, we must not go down this road in America. We’ve traveled it before, throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer.”
