Liberal celebrities, journalists, and politicians, up to and including the sitting president, had been steadily intensifying incitement against Donald Trump prior to the assassination attempt against him on Saturday.
CELEBRITIES.
Hollywood liberals have been threatening violence or wishing violence upon Trump for years. Among others, Robert De Niro called Trump a “dog” and a “pig” in 2016, seething about wanting to “punch him in the face.”
The alleged comedienne Kathy Griffin infamously posed with a bloody model of Trump’s severed head in 2017. She claimed to be remorseful after receiving backlash—and a drop in job offers—but repeated the stunt in 2023.
Theater director Oskar Eustis put on a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar portraying the Roman leader as Trump, complete with a bloody assassination, the same year.
While in the United Kingdom in 2017, Johnny Depp asked a festival audience, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? … [I]t’s been a while and maybe it’s time”—referencing the murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.
Previously, Madonna had said she “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House” at the 2017 Women’s March.
Mickey Rourke, like De Niro, spoke of his desire to give Trump a “left hook from hell” on multiple occasions, most recently in 2019.
JOURNALISTS.
The corporate media has been inciting the public against Trump for many years, ramping up its efforts with particular intensity in recent weeks as he rises in the polls.
Earlier this month, The New Republic ran a cover portraying Trump as Adolf Hitler, complete with mustache, under the strapline ‘American fascism,’ insisting he is “damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
In December, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post ran an article titled, ‘Yes, it’s OK to compare Trump to Hitler.’
On July 2, The Huffington Post website ran an article on the Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents have a presumption of immunity from prosecution—if not impeachment—for official acts with the headline, ‘Supreme Court Gives Joe Biden The Legal OK To Assassinate Donald Trump.’
Similarly, BBC presenter David Aaronovitch responded to the ruling with a “satirical” social media post recommending that Biden should “hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security.”
Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe issued an unhinged rant in November warning Trump was “running to end American democracy” and would exile, imprison, and even “execute” his opponents once reelected.
POLITICIANS.
Politicians have also played a prominent role in stirring up fear and hatred against Trump, largely by scaremongering about him becoming a dictator.
“It’s just unquestionable at this point that that man cannot see public office again. He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated,” Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman recently told former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, in a clip that has been widely recirculated following Saturday’s assassination attempt.
Robert Kagan, the war hawk neoconservative husband of war hawk former Biden official Victoria Nuland, wrote a 6,000-word essay declaring that a “Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” adding: “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him—pots, pans, candlesticks—in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up.”
In April, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security, actually put forward legislation to strip anyone sentenced to a year or more in prison for a federal or state felony of Secret Service protection, in anticipation of a possible prison sentence for Trump in Manhattan. This was widely interpreted as a move to make it easier for someone to kill him.
In 2017, Democratic state senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal of Missouri posted, “I hope Trump is assassinated!” on Facebook. Congressman Maxine Waters said she wanted to “go and take Trump out” the same year.
As long ago as 2015, Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson said the “GOP donor class” was “going to have to go out and put a bullet in” then-candidate Trump.
BIDEN.
Perhaps no politician has done as much to incite the public against Trump as Joe Biden. The incumbent, up to the day of the assassination attempt, was posting on social media that Trump means to become a dictator.
On July 5, referencing the aforementioned immunity ruling, he claimed the former president “really could” become a dictator if reelected.
“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy,” he said on June 28, adding: “He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
It is a theme he has been playing on for years: “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country,” he posted in 2022.
Biden uses similarly inflammatory rhetoric in private, telling donors in a July 8 call reported by the press: “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
show lessNEW from @thenatpulse: EXC: Steve Bannon Reacts to 45 Assassination Attempt: 'Trump Wears the Armor of God.'
Former White House Chief Strategist and ……
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— Raheem. (@RaheemKassam) July 14, 2024
