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Home - Political Violence News - They Said ‘Punch Him’—Now It’s Bullets: The Dangerous Escalation No One Wants to Admit

They Said ‘Punch Him’—Now It’s Bullets: The Dangerous Escalation No One Wants to Admit

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

We have had the third attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, where shots were exchanged within two years, recently at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., last Saturday evening. No president in U.S. history has been the object, the target, of three assassination attempts in which shots were fired by either law enforcement or the shooter himself.

And yet Trump—this is the third time.

So, we’ve had Cole Tomas Allen. We had Ryan Routh, remember, in Palm Beach, and we had Thomas Crooks on the roof in Butler. We also had a young man—Jonathan Oddi—and he was the person who tried to break into Mar‑a‑Lago and kill Trump, and he was killed himself by law enforcement.

Trump was not at Mar‑a‑Lago, but what is building this up? What’s the reason for all this? I’ll give you some examples. One is Hasan Piker. He’s sort of the Nick Fuentes of the Left. He’s an influencer, a podcaster, a commentator, and he’s captivated the base of the Left with his extreme anti‑Israel, antisemitic, pro‑Hamas, pro‑ISIS Islamist rhetoric. And he has said most recently, in an interview with The New Yorker and a New York Times reporter, that it was fine to steal from the Louvre, steal from stores, according to his Marxist doctrine that people must take what they need, given what he feels is the oppression of capitalism.

He also, remember, very controversially in this interview excused—or praised—he didn’t want to quite say that he would have killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. But he said it was a “social murder.” In other words, according to Marxist dialogue, that’s a term that people use to say that when somebody is deemed arbitrarily the enemy of the people, you can kill them with exemption.

But here’s what I’m getting at. In an earlier interview, he said, “Everybody knows someone has to do it.” And Taylor Lorenz, who had interviewed him on, I guess, more than one occasion, pointed out that he was talking at that time about killing Trump. So, he’d lowered the bar. In addition to people like Hasan Piker, there’s a number of celebrities, movie stars, political figures, and they’ve lowered the bar of what’s acceptable.

And by that I mean they have, in various waves, talked about either killing Trump or beating him up. And they all have preferred methodologies. Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom or Robert De Niro—their preference was hitting him in the mouth. You remember that. Pelosi said, “I’d like to hit him, and then I would go to jail.” Newsom said he wanted to hit him in the mouth. Robert De Niro has said it so many times I can’t even recall them all.

For Kathy Griffin, remember, her preferred method was decapitation. For Shakespeare in the Park, remember that Shakespearean troupe that substituted a person who looked like Trump for Julius Caesar, where he was stabbed numerous times.

We had a famous chef who suggested he would like to poison Trump. We had Snoop Dogg, who said that he would shoot Trump, and I think he reenacted that. We’ve had people who have suggested—I think—we had a rock group that portrayed Trump as being eaten by vultures.

I could go on, but my point is that people on the Left in popular culture have, for now almost a decade, reified the idea—the abstract idea—of killing Trump with real examples, and that lowers the bar. And that means people like Cole Tomas Allen come out of the woodwork, or Oddi, or Routh, or Crooks. They come out because they feel that they’re going to be in the pantheon of leftist heroes if they kill Trump.

It’s not just these people, though. There’s also, remember, major figures—not just people in Hollywood or politicians—but major institutions that have talked about Trump as a fascist. Kamala Harris has said that Donald Trump—on two occasions—was a fascist.

Tim Walz just flew all the way to anti‑American Barcelona, Spain, in a time of war and wrote off the effort of our military, and Donald Trump is fascism. That was the sixth time—six times—he’s called Trump a fascist. Do you remember The New Republic cover during the campaign, where they had a picture of Donald Trump Photoshopped as if he were Adolf Hitler?

Joy Reid—who’s now gone from the network, she’s lost her job—almost religiously said that Donald Trump was a Hitlerian figure. Rachel Maddow said, “I have to study Hitler more to understand Trump.”

Well, my point is this. If all these celebrities are talking about killing him, burning him, cutting him in pieces, blowing him up—remember Madonna and Moby, “Let’s blow him up”—if they all do that ad nauseam again and again over a decade, and then you have this new heartthrob, the Nick Fuentes of the left, Hasan Piker, and he’s really legitimizing murder by contextualizing Luigi Mangione and making him into a hero, then everybody knows what you have to do.

So, he is lowering the bar. And then you have these major news reporters and politicians talking about Trump. And when I say “major,” I mean the Democratic ticket was headed by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and what they have in common is that they referred to Donald Trump as a fascist.

My point is this: If you believe he’s a fascist like Hitler—and you many times refer to him as Hitler, as many have done—Hitler caused a war that killed 70 million people. He incinerated 6 million Jews and another half-million Roma, homosexuals, and political prisoners. So, he is an evil man.

So, if a person is a little bit unhinged, or he is on social media, or he is suffering from arrested development and living at home, like many of these people were, they get it into their head that if I shoot Donald Trump, I’m going to be in the pantheon of leftist heroes for the rest of eternity. And maybe they’re right, because remember, you go into social media sometimes and these people will celebrate the attempt but regret the inability to kill Trump.

Now, let me just finish by saying, over this two‑year period, there have been three attempts. He’s got two more years in office. The Secret Service was lax under [Joe] Biden. They did a wonderful job inside the Hilton Hotel, but there were problems—why Allen was able to go in, check in with weaponry, and apparently walk around with weapons in his possession, and no one found him or checked him, or there was no security check at the entrance of the hotel.

So, my point is, in the next two years, we should expect—unfortunately, tragically—more of these assassination attempts unless we get people in the Democratic Party to speak out and say, “Stop it.”

We’ve had Steve Scalise and the baseball shooting. Bernie Sanders did that. We had Charlie Kirk, who was shot. Another leftist shot him. People on the Left—many of them—celebrated him. Hakeem Jeffries came out after this talk and said, “What? We’ve got to lower the temperature.”

Congratulations, House Minority Leader Jeffries. I just wish that when you opposed the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” you didn’t pose with a baseball bat, or that female members of the congressional Democratic delegation didn’t make a video about fighting and kickboxing and punching an imaginary Trump, as we were supposed to understand.

Or maybe, Representative Jeffries, just maybe, you should tell major luminaries on the Democratic side of politics—Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Tim Walz, Jasmine Crockett, Kamala Harris—please stop calling Trump a fascist, Hitler. Then we would believe you. But otherwise, we simply don’t.

And you’ve lowered the bar for every nut in America to take a shot at a president.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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