This assassination attempt feels different.
Following the previous attempts on the president’s life, progressives briefly acknowledged that their false and ugly depiction of Donald Trump as a modern-day Hitler with a penchant for rape may have inspired the violence.
One might hope for deeper soul searching this time, considering that the would-be assassin at last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner specifically echoed left-wing talking points about the “traitor” and “pedophile” in the White House.
Instead of experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment, progressives have denied, deflected, and explained away their complicity.
Some give-no-quarter lefties claimed that Trump had staged the incident to make himself the victim, while many others blamed Trump for poisoning the nation – i.e., he had it coming.
In a disturbing interview with Trump after the shooting, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked the president to comment on the gunman’s unhinged insults in a tone that indicated he has a point, doesn’t he?
To the extent Democrats have taken any responsibility for their incendiary rhetoric, it is in the context of arguing that Trump also spews violent rhetoric. Fair enough. His nasty language and memes are a plague. But where most Republican leaders routinely, though ineffectually, condemn his sallies, Democratic poohbahs such as James Carville unapologetically ratchet up the hate.
When someone on your side uses your language to commit a sinister act, basic humanity requires self-reflection. How did it get this far? What’s my responsibility?
This, however, requires a recognition that you’ve done something wrong. That brings us to the nub of the issue: Democrats don’t see their grotesque attacks on Trump as neutral facts. One of their sharpest attack dogs, Rep. Jamin Raskin, made this clear on CNN last Sunday when he seemed mystified by questions about his party’s incendiary rhetoric. “I have no personal problem with Donald Trump at all,” the Maryland House member said. “I’m talking about policies. I don’t personalize it.”
Translation: Our critiques of Trump are just fair and accurate statements about the man, so we have no reason to change.
Raskin’s comments convey an even darker implication: If the truth about Trump drives some to attempt murder, then, well, you reap what you sow.
It is the same logic expressed by the online mobs celebrating Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.
This normalization of political violence has been underscored by how quickly much of the media has made Saturday’s assassination attempt a secondary story – by turning an attempt on the president’s life into just another blip in the news cycle.
It is tempting to say that Democrats and their media allies crossed the Rubicon in their response to Saturday’s near-tragedy, embracing what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries calls their strategy of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” against the President. Tout pour la guerre. (“Everything for the war.”)
History, however, rarely changes in a flash, and this dangerous mindset has evolved over the last decade as the Democratic Party has given itself over to the unbending ideology and tactics of the far-left.
The short version is that when Donald Trump became a serious political figure in 2015, many liberals concluded that they weren’t tough enough to take on a man who challenged their policies and rhetoric with brass knuckles.
Like the relatively moderate Mensheviks in revolutionary Russia, whose opposition to the Tsar led them initially to embrace Lenin’s coup in 1917, liberal Democrats ceded power to the take-no-prisoners left. The Mensheviks, like contemporary American liberals, were eventually subsumed – albeit, often far more violently – by the far more radical Bolsheviks. (Moderate Germans made a similar mistake in the early 1930s when they thought they could control Hitler’s National Socialists).
Democrats have not only moved far to the left during the last decade, but they have also normalized this radical lurch. Consider that Barack Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage, supported strong borders, and bristled at the mere suggestion he had socialist tendencies during his 2008 campaign.
Today, his party supports transgender surgery for minors and de facto open borders while unabashed “democratic socialists” such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani are ascendant in a party whose rank and file members strongly prefer socialism over capitalism.
Despite efforts to cast this transformation as a continuation of the great American quest for justice, leftists do not operate from an American playbook – which is not surprising given polls showing they have much less pride in country than other groups. Make no mistake, there is no special version of U.S. leftism – comrades always sing from the same book, they always present the same dangers.
The left has never believed in accommodation, compromise, or democratic will. It cannot compromise because it has fixed ideas about the arc of history and believes it is duty-bound to eliminate obstacles – often people with different ideas – by any means necessary. This is what we saw in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in China, Cambodia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and everywhere else where they have seized power.
That’s why Democrats feverishly sought to undo their results of Trump’s first election through the Russiagate hoax and bogus impeachments; why they have worked to silence dissent through aggressive censorship campaigns and the dishonest reporting in legacy media outlets; and why they encouraged violent unrest through their support of the massive BLM riots of 2020 – which helped legitimize violent protest and set the stage for the right’s Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
The left always rejects individual freedom in the name of class struggle. That’s why one of the Biden administration’s chief goals was to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion on every facet of American life – casting people as members of groups to be celebrated or demonized. Where the Nazi’s attacked Jews, Democrats assailed “white privilege.” Where the Soviets went after the kulaks, the forces of DEI excoriated millionaires and billionaires.
The historic problem the left always faces is that its failed policies inevitably demand ever higher degrees of violent coercion to stifle dissent. Not surprisingly, a 2025 YouGov poll reported that 42% of those who described themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” agreed with the statement that it is “justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals.” Only 9% of those who described themselves as “very conservative” or conservative” agreed with that statement.
In a New York Times podcast aired just before the latest attempt on Trump’s life, leftist influencer Hasan Piker received almost no pushback when he framed political murder as raising questions of efficacy rather than morality. Is this the best way to get the job done?
The Democratic Party’s sharp leftward turn signals the unraveling of the American project. While the party’s leaders still pay lip service to our political tradition, they have embraced ideas that reject the democratic norms and individual freedoms that have been at the heart of our exceptional nation. As the Democrats seem poised to make big gains in the upcoming midterm elections, one can note that the will of the people still rules.
But that will is dangerous. As Voltaire observed, a few decades before the bloody French Revolution, “Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
