It's barely 24 hours after another assassination attempt against former President Trump, but this time, we are definitely not struggling to know what the shooter believes. His profile couldn't be clearer. Ryan Wesley Routh is a regular donor to Act Blue, a funding funnel to Democrats including Harris-Walz and to federal and state Democrat parties and candidates.
Routh voted for Trump in 2016, but then he turned a 180 and dedicated himself to advancing the war in Ukraine – by trying to assemble a private, international army to fight for Kiev. He reportedly traveled to Ukraine. As recruiting for his private army started to peter out, he sought to attract fighters from Afghanistan to the front. All this activity brought him attention that, to say the least, is near impossible for a single citizen to garner. Both The New York Times and Newsweek interviewed him about his efforts to assemble a mercenary army for Ukraine.
Is he a crazed loner? The investigation better be thorough. Many of his themes echo the main messages of today's Democrat nominees, who continue to call Trump a "threat to democracy." Routh's rhetoric tracks the language of Harris and Walz, and the relentless demagoguery of Biden before them. Worse has been the reaction since this latest shooting from other leading Democrats.
Alexander Vindman, a national security official who was a witness against Trump in his first impeachment trial, is running as a Democrat in a swing district in Virginia. Shortly after yesterday's attack, his wife Rachel put a mocking post on X, "No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon." Challenged about the flippancy of her remark, Mrs. Vindman went on a tirade attacking Trump for going to Arlington National Cemetery, where he attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the request of families who lost a child in the Biden/Harris disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.
A witch's brew is now steaming before our eyes. The verbal explosions and lies about Trump went mainstream long ago and are escalating. His opponents continue to deploy rhetoric that exacerbates the threat environment – not just against Trump but the entire constituency of his MAGA movement. Pro-lifers, advocates of the Second Amendment, defenders of America First – all are scorned as beyond the pale and enemies of fundamental freedoms or public safety. This rhetoric increases the daily threat level to Trump. At the same time, the Biden/Harris administration refuses to take the security steps necessary to prevent Trump from being killed.
The left is suggesting that Trump himself is bringing on these attacks. Really? An assassin came within an inch of taking the life of Ronald Reagan, who carried 49 states a few years later. An assassin killed JFK and Martin Luther King, and two assassins came close with Gerald Ford, hardly a figure of controversy. What kind of people use vicious political rhetoric against Trump and conservatives and then blame the victims of the violence for causing the violence?
The left would love it if the growing threats against Trump caused him to limit his campaigning, rallies and political boldness. Some of the more radical leftists will applaud if the next assassination attempt succeeds.
The New Normal Is Deranged
Having been in Washington for half a century now, I've pretty much gotten used to the normal distortions and exaggerations of political debate. It's a quadrennial favorite to label the GOP the "party of the rich." Never mind the Democrats hyping endorsements by their billionaires' club and the world's only billionaire pop star. Never mind Donald Trump proposing tax cuts for hourly employees, restaurant staff, and Social Security recipients. Calling the GOP the party of the rich is as false as cotton candy, but par for the course. We expect it every four years.
What isn't normal is the barrage of statements about Trump that are not only false but slanderous and that have been repeatedly debunked only to surface again as if no one questions them. Time and again, leading Democrats and their pundit pals tell us Trump was elected because of Vladimir Putin, that he is a Hitler wannabe (somehow ardently defending Israel's right to exist), a man pledged to be a dictator on day one of a new administration, a man who promised a bloodbath if he didn't get elected again, a voucher for the character of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, a cynic who labeled America's war dead "suckers" and "losers." All of these charges and more are provably false, and most have been rebutted by sources that have little or no sympathy for Trump's actual policy positions on peace, energy policy, late-term abortion and other subjects that are the real fodder of political debate.
All appeals to these critics, many of them on the establishment left, continue to fall on deaf ears. If two assassination attempts, the latest by a man who had written publicly of his hope that Iran would assassinate Trump, don't succeed in persuading them to end their prattle about the death of democracy, what will?
Miranda Devine at The New York Post has done the kind of against-the-headwinds journalism that, in normal times, would have garnered her a Pulitzer Prize. The Hunter Biden laptop was dismissed by nearly the entire national security nexus, but her gutty reporting proved to be 100% accurate. Devine recounts how in the last week alone Harris called Trump responsible for "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War" and running mate Tim Walz hit him as a "fascist" and a "threat to democracy" who will "put people's lives in danger." Devine asks the right question: "What will it take for these demented partisans to lower the temperature?"
Jordan Boyd over at The Federalist, a temperate conservative outlet, struck the same theme and pointed to even more examples of the major media's derangement. She cited NBC's Lester Holt, who in the hours just after yesterday's shooting segued from the attack and linked it to "fierce rhetoric" and "baseless claims" – from Trump and JD Vance! There is shamelessness and then there is depravity. And this kind of willful blindness to the left's verbal outrages – a verbiage that can convince people like Ryan Wesley Routh that they will be hailed by millions of their fellow Americans as heroes and peacemakers – is nothing short of depraved.
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