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

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

Assassins are motivated by all sorts of impulses, but certainly they do not act in a void.

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Same old, same old: Target Trump

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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........

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