Same old, same old: Target Trump

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

HANSON: From one assassination attempt to the next — Mainstreaming violence against a president Back to video

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........

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