Yes, They Mean It
The Left has been fantasizing and fetishizing the violent death of Donald Trump for the last eight years, they will not stop now
By Mark Cromer
“Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler.” Saying that three times, perhaps while closing their eyes and clicking their heels, would still be too bitter a horse pill of reality for many people to swallow; among them filmmaker Spike Lee, actor Louis C.K. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all of whom have likened the billionaire businessman leading the Republican primary race to a ruthless dictator that sent tens of millions of people to the slaughter houses of the Nazi death camps and the charnel houses of the battlefields. From the streets of Chicago to Arizona highways to Emory University to the pages of the Los Angeles Times, the dangerously escalating anti-Trump rhetoric seeks to reach critical mass by inspiring a criminal act against America’s new Kingfish
— from my column The Day of The Jackals, published here on The Cromer Reader on March 22, 2016.
Hours after a gunman attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, actor James Woods offered one of the most succinct observations amidst the shooting’s resulting social media blizzard: “We were two inches away from civil war today. It is not a prospect I relish, but one that is to be feared if Democrats don’t stop their absurd, vile Hitler analogies and their assassination glee.”
What remains of the American construct may in fact be much closer to a horrifically violent unraveling than even those two inches, given that the long-running homicidal tendencies of the radical Left that have been embraced and even normalized by mainstream Democratic Party members are unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.
Add to that the fact that at least 100 million Americans don’t believe they need to dust the gunman’s weapon to find the figurative fingerprints of the Democrats’ talking points on the trigger and the United States is indeed sitting on a proverbial powder keg that’s ready to blow.
But what to do about it now?
Emoting pleas of ‘unity’ is seen by most people as the cheap charade that it is, an after-the-fact deflection primarily meant to shield those culpable far more than it is to benefit the nation as a cohesive and functioning enterprise. It’s like watching those who egged on a schoolyard fight suddenly proclaim they tried to stop it as soon as they thought someone might get hurt.
Bullshit, they wanted to see someone get hurt. And in Trump’s case, they wanted to see someone get killed.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that the Left means it when they talk about Trump’s death. Through their explicit exhortations and psychotic visualizations of it to the ubiquitous coded references of his demise that now routinely appear in speeches, social media posts and in run-of-the-mill interviews on the broadcast and cable news networks, it’s clear the Left is not just playing make-believe with his murder for the fun of it.
Yes, they mean it.
Shortly after Trump assumed office in 2017, the Public Theater in New York City began staging what it billed as its revival of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar in Central Park, a reboot that featured Trump as Caesar. The ritualistic slaughtering of Trump onstage proved to be a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser for fashionably liberal Manhattanites, many of whom viewed the fantasy killing of Trump as a sign that the theatre wasn’t really dead after all, even if they could only dream that Trump was. Efforts by Trump supporters to protest the staged celebration of Trump’s assassination were quickly snuffed out to the equal delight of the audiences, who weren’t going to let a little modicum of decency kill their buzz.
“Two thuggish Twitter trolls disrupted Julius Caesar tonight,” wrote journalist and author Mark Harris on his own Twitter feed on June 16, 2017. “They were escorted out. News that the show would resume got a standing ovation.”
Just a month earlier, Kathy Griffin had infamously posed for a gory photo of her holding up Trump’s severed head, the latex face drenched in faux blood. While the photograph cost Griffin a gig at CNN, it also achieved what the D-Lister surely hoped it would, going viral and propelling her into the hearts and minds of Leftists everywhere.
Before 2017 was over, what remained of the major metro daily newspapers had refashioned themselves into frontline cultural combat units dedicated to painting Trump as a political descendant of Adolf Hitler, a crafty beerhall rabblerouser who had assembled a mob of white supremacists by appealing to their racist souls. With this ongoing narrative serving as an evergreen backdrop of incitement, no exhortation since has been too brazen or too menacing for Leftists and many Democratic Party leaders to embrace.
On the eve of the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, up and coming Democratic Congressman Daniel Goldman appeared on MSNBC to make a very clear declaration regarding Trump: “And it is just unquestionable at this point that man cannot see public office again. He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated.”
The congressman’s words were clearly music to the ears of Jen Psaki, the former press secretary for President Joe Biden who was interviewing Goldman on her cable news show. Psaki began nodding a rhythmic beat of concurrence as Goldman spelled out that Trump had to be “eliminated” to ensure “he cannot see public office again.”
Several days after he had so matter-of-factly not only sanctioned the killing of Trump but impressed on Psaki’s viewers the vital necessity of his murder, Goldman attempted to walk back his comments, haphazardly apologizing for what he claimed was a poor choice of words. Yet anyone who watches and listens to Goldman, as he urges Psaki’s MSNBC viewers into action against Trump, can see and hear for themselves that he was speaking very deliberately and was very cognizant of the words and phrasing he employed.
Perhaps he was spooked by his own candor after the fact, but there is no question that Goldman knew what he was saying and indeed meant every word of it.
Colorado Democratic State Representative Steven Woodrow took to Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt to bemoan the result of the gunman’s failure to succeed: “The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil but here we are.” Like Goldman before him, Woodrow apparently had second thoughts for speaking so openly about his desire to see Trump neutralized and promptly deleted his Twitter account, but it’s a safe bet that Woodrow will double-down and lean into it for the entertainment and edification of the Aspen After Dark crowd.
In Seattle, journalist Ashley Nerbovig also leapt into action on social media following the attempt on Trump’s life, posting on her Twitter account the simple slogan: “make america aim again.” Perhaps she kept the line all lower case to convey a digital whisper, but Nerbovig’s missive was heard loud and clear and the writer who has been published by Seattle’s powerful alternative weekly The Stranger quickly began vanishing herself online within hours of her post, disappearing her profiles across a variety of platforms. Yet anyone familiar with the prevailing politics across Puget Sound understands that Nerbovig will be the toast of the town from Tacoma to Port Townsend.
And what of old Joe Biden?
Well, America watched as the president-in-name appeared on camera to declare the assassination attempt to be a “sick” act of political violence that has no place in a functioning democracy like the United States. It’s a nice sentiment, to be sure, but one that coming from Biden now understandably rang hollow to the tens of millions of Americans who have watched and listened to him spend years denouncing them as a tribe of vile bigots hellbent on creating a white ethnostate with Trump as their President for Life.
Biden’s shrieking indictment that charged they were seeking to put black Americans “back in chains” still echo in their ears, his toxic imputation that Trump seeks to restore Jim Crow across the nation still nauseates their stomachs and ices their veins. So, Biden’s perfunctory read from the teleprompter did nothing to assuage their sense that the Left’s long-running rhetoric finally paid off and had indeed put Trump “in a bullseye”—which Biden had vowed to do less than a week before Trump was shot.
The calls for calm by the very people who have been stoking hysteria for years about Trump are meaningless without some collective sense of genuine public reflection by the Left and some meaningful measures of atonement. What would that look like? Well, for a political movement that is obsessed with controlling language, it might be a start to dial down their more hideous impulses to label their opponents as Nazis and Trump as their Hitler. They might consider the unsustainable incongruity that holds misgendering someone is a hate crime but calling someone a genocidal mass murderer is standard political operating procedure.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that will occur on any relevant scale or over a long enough timeline to register an impact.
In April of 2017, just three months into Trump’s presidency, the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times published a serialized declaration of war against a presidency still in its infancy, laying bare for what remained of its readership the newspaper’s militarization and mobilization for total war to be waged against Trump, his administration and his supporters. Seven years later, the skeletal remnants of the newspaper (this writer was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times from 1992 to 1998, back when it was still a newspaper of record) continue their jihad from an El Segundo office building, surviving on the subsistence rations provided by their billionaire owner and seemingly prepared to march onward to oblivion unrepentant for their unholy war against Trump.
Expecting a serialized mea culpa from the paper’s Editorial Board in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump, some deep public soul-searching by the newspaper spread across what few pages remain to the old broadsheet, is misguided at best. More accurately, it’s delusional.
It’s far more likely that the Editorial Board at the Los Angeles Times—and at so many other newspaper relics across the country—feel a smug sense of accomplishment and a comforting contentment at having come so tantalizing close to achieving their ultimate objective.
From the ghost town newsrooms across Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Chicago and Washington to the glitzy news studios, podcast lounges and social media influencer pages; from the Hollywood red carpet crowd and their award show ingénues who parrot the lines they’ve been fed to the halls of power across the state capitals and throughout the seat of imperial power inside the Beltway, there will be precious little in the way of true reflection and remorse.
If the Left offers anything in hindsight, it is likely regret that their years of diligent handiwork did not ultimately inspire a better marksman than Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man authorities have identified as pulling the trigger.
But one thing is certain: The Left has been fantasizing and fetishizing the violent death of Donald Trump for the last eight years and they will not stop now.