The Democrats Who Want Trump Dead

Harris knows she is putting Trump’s life in danger, and yet she does it anyway

The former and possible next President, Donald Trump, survived a second assassination attempt between holes five and six at his International Golf Course in Palm Beach, Florida, last week. According to the US Justice Department, suspected shooter Ryan Wesley Routh wrote in a note titled “Dear World”: "This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster”. Routh dropped it off at an unidentified person's house before travelling to Palm Beach — indicating he expected his note would be read posthumously, but that his assassination attempt would fail.

Routh seems to be a devotee of the Omnicause: a set of seemingly incoherent positions on political topics, which overlap by advancing the intersecting interests of oppressed victim groups, as determined by progressive politicians. It’s why activists predictably adorn their social media bios with Rainbow, Ukraine, and Palestine flags, told everyone to mask up and get vaccinated two years ago, and are certain the climate crisis will kill us all in five years’ time. Routh appears to have wanted to been remembered as a martyr to this Omnicause.

The Omnicause issue which stuck most in Routh’s craw was the war in Ukraine. He posted on his X account that he intended “to fight and die for Ukraine”. Routh attempted to enlist in Zelensky’s International Legion — but was rejected for his combat inexperience. He subsequently self-published a book, memorably titled Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen - Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity. In it, he said Iran should feel “free to assassinate Trump”. 

Media have made much of Routh’s admission that he voted for Trump in 2016, but less of his donations since. Federal Election Commission filings show Routh donated nineteen times to Democrat political action committee ActBlue between September 2019 and March 2020 — during the Presidential nominee race. He voted in the 2024 Democrat primaries in March, and supported Nikki Haley as a Republican challenger to Trump. His son told the Daily Mail that both he and his father hate Trump as “every reasonable person does”.

Everyone can see that Routh is a few clowns short of a Harris rally. But he’s far from a lone wolf in his intent to kill the once and potentially-future President. Republican Representative Matt Gaetz revealed last week that there are “five teams” — three foreign, from Iran, Ukraine, and Pakistan, and two domestic — with designs to end the life of Donald Trump. The Democrats themselves should be counted among these “teams”. Routh’s delusions were stoked by Democrats’ depictions of Donald Trump as “a threat to democracy”. Routh saw Ukraine as a proxy for the threat dictators in the twentieth-century mold may pose to democracy. He posted on X in April that “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose”, in support of President Biden. Biden himself said “There is one existential threat: it’s Donald Trump” at a February fundraiser. On July 12th, Biden said “I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation”.

In his “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech in 2022, lit as if delivered from the bowels of Hell, Biden said:

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. [...]

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country. [...]

That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.

But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can: We are not powerless in the face of these threats.  We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.

There are far more Americans — far more Americans from every — from every background and belief who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it.

And, folks, it is within our power, it’s in our hands — yours and mine — to stop the assault on American democracy.

Biden is clear: there isn’t a hint of hope for reconciliation with the >74 million Americans who voted for Trump. The President persisted with this line of attack until, on July 13th 2024, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, wounded two of his supporters, and killed father and firefighter Cory Comperatore, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Hours before, those controlling Biden’s X account posted “Americans want a president, not a dictator”. Eight days later Biden announced he would not seek re-election.

His replacement hasn’t softened her rhetoric. Vice President Harris has said “We are fighting for our democracy” and ran campaign ads stating “It’s simple: Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy”. In August, she corralled Capitol police officers into her campaign, who called Trump “the biggest threat to our democracy”. Two days after Routh’s thwarted assassination attempt, Harris said Democrats must ensure Trump “can’t have that microphone again”. Obfuscating the threat to his life, Harris blamed Trump for why “Members of the LGBTQ community don’t feel safe right now, immigrants or people with an immigrant background don’t feel safe right now. Women don’t feel safe right now”.

Attempts by sympathetic press to generate a “joyful” aura around the Harris campaign culminated in the attempt to make the juvenile pejorative “Weird” stick to Trump and Vance. (This from the party who believe men can become women.) Had Harris watched Mean Girls, she would know that you can’t just make “Fetch” happen. But her allies have admitted that “Weird” was an attempt to soften Biden’s “a threat to democracy” attack after Crooks shot Trump. Concealed in that rebrand attempt to “something more light-touch” is the admission that their rhetoric led to the assassination attempts on Trump.

Neither have her allies let up. The New York Times ran a splash page calling Trump a traitor one day after his first brush with a bullet. Now, after Routh’s arrest, Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine insisted “Donald Trump Is a Threat to Democracy, and Saying So Is Not Incitement”. Hillary Clinton told Rachel Maddow the press must have “a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is [...] his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world”. Harris campaign surrogate Stacey Plaskett let slip on MSNBC that “[Trump] needs to be shot— stopped”.

The relentless hyperbole painting Trump as a Hitler-in-waiting has inspired febrile minds to take matters into their own hands. Since 2016, those watching CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, or reading the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME Magazine, or the Atlantic may be forgiven for thinking a Fourth Reich is right around the corner. Even the creator of Godwin’s law has encouraged comparisons between Trump and Hitler. The New Republic magazine amalgamated Trump’s face with Hitler’s on the cover of its June edition. Joy Reid, a week before the first attempt on Trump’s life, said “If it's Biden in a coma, I'm voting for him. This is about keeping HitIer out [of] the White House”. Her response to Crooks’ assassination attempt? A “deep concern” that the media would “acquiesce” by moderating their attacks on Trump. No wonder new polling from Rasmussen found 17% of Americans — 28% of Democrats — believe America would have been better off if Trump had been killed.

The Secret Service has suggested Trump’s security detail may receive reinforcements. This follows congressional Democrats’ attempt in April to strip him of it entirely. But the necessity of this is because his political opponents know that their rhetoric inspires vigilantism, and yet they will not stop.

This poses the question: How can Democrats accuse an elected President, and the most popular incumbent in American history, of being “a threat to democracy”, while taking anti-democratic, censorious, litigious, and even lethal action against him?

It is possible that this is a cynical rhetorical tactic by Democrats. But how could this charge stick for millions of Americans if not rooted within the presumptions underpinning the republic?

Contrary to scaremongering about Trump being “a dictator [on] day one”, or “terminating” the Constitution, progressives aren’t keen on the checks and balances placed on state power by the Founders. As Jennifer Szalai wrote recently in the New York Times, “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it”. She laments how the Supreme Court’s originalist justices have prevented new amendments from being added for fifty years. For progressives, statecraft is not a delicate art of limiting executive power according to the line between good and evil running through every human heart. Rather, it is the business of government to shepherd their citizens into utopia, and steward the long arc of history as it bends toward social justice. Any limit on its remit to enumerate more rights — to healthcare, housing, and protection from hurt feelings — is a cruel and unnecessary punishment by Republicans.

What we must understand is that “democracy” to Democrats means something very different than one man, one vote. As Emily Finley explains in The Ideology of Democratism, those who exalt democracy as a shared ideal are “enchanted with an imaginative vision of democracy that at times is almost indistinguishable from religious belief”. The way Democrats speak of democracy when criticizing Donald Trump is akin to worshipping it as a good until itself; rather than preferring it as a process by which political representatives are selected with maximum accountability.

Finley explains the logic of these “Democratists” as follows:

[The] belief that the people are generally good leads to the idea that the people must only be awakened through some form of enlightenment to their true and rational interests. Then, it is assumed, they will elect leaders representing the policies that correspond with those interests. It is always assumed that the people’s best interests align with those valued by democratism. Politics is a matter of correct reasoning and judgment rather than a moral-ethical challenge.

Democracy is premised on the belief that human beings share an egalitarian nature, and are equipped with rational faculties to reach the same conclusion about what is in their best interest. Therefore, mass enfranchisement will produce a uniform, predictable, progressive outcome. Hence why Democrats abhor anyone imposing identity verification requirements, proof of citizenship, civics tests, or other criteria on access to voting.

The presumption that we all share interests derived from our egalitarian nature is why Adam Grant, also in the New York Times, wrote an essay advocating government by random lot, originally titled “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”. The article ends with:

The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.

A random sampling of people will produce more progressive outcomes, according to Grant, because their natures have not been warped by interfacing with the institutions which produce politicians. The less contaminated by civilization man is, the better qualified they will be to govern according to our identical interests.

This belief in an egalitarian human nature is derived from the Enlightenment. Kamala Harris’ Marxist heritage has been well publicized. Marx believed man’s behavior is a product of economic circumstance. Were it not for the inequality engineered by greedy capitalists, man would be able to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”, with equitable outcomes in all his ventures. But the majority of Democrats couldn’t quote from Das Kapital, and yet still act as if this bogus anthropology is true. This is because the very same version of human nature found in Marxism is shared by classical liberalism.

Finley finds the foundations of democracy in the three preeminent classical liberal thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. For Hobbes, man’s state of nature was bellum omnium contra omnes: a war off all against all, driven by libido dominandi — a desire for conquest, and to avoid death. He advocated an absolute sovereign be given power to arbitrate all disputes, and to “reduce all their wills by plurality of voices unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person”. This subjugation of competing visions of the good under one appears to be the origin of the idea of representative governance.

Locke, the favored philosopher of America’s founders, stated all men originated in “a state of perfect freedom” and “perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another”. Man left this state of nature to construct a state by consensus, compromising on some of his freedom to protect private property, and sacrificing equality to reduce material privation. The state and culture exist in an antagonistic relationship with individual citizens, for whom any limit on their freedom of will constitutes oppression.

This evolution in liberal thought led to Rousseau, who conceived of man’s state of nature as a Garden of Eden where individuals sated their appetites wholly independent of relationships with one another. They had material abundance and were free from responsibilities — until “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine” ruined it for everyone. Rousseau believed “that man is naturally good and that it is from [our] institutions alone that men become wicked”. If only a state with unrestricted jurisdiction, working in the presumed best interest — the “General Will” — of everyone, could confiscate property, to hold all in common, we would remember how we were once all free and equal again.

What all three thinkers share is the belief that human beings are tabula rasa — blank slates, onto which education, economic circumstances, culture, and institutions transcribe beliefs and behaviors. The horrors of the Holocaust, and legislative victories of the Civil Rights movement, made this human egalitarianism the de facto cultural assumption in America. From this anthropology do Democrats derive both their unending crusade of antiracism, and their mandate to accrue more powers to the federal government to act on behalf of American citizens. Progressivism, then, is the use of technology, culture, and state power to reduce the limits placed on the freedom of the individual by material conditions and social bonds. What we are progressing toward is a reversion to the State of Nature, in which we were all free and equal — in the imagination of Democrats.

Democracy, then, to Democrats, means: the system by which man’s free and equal nature is revealed to him, and expressed in identical fashion. As such, voting in a democracy is thought to be an exercise of everyone making the same choice over and over. As in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We:

Tomorrow is the day for the annual election of the Benefactor. [...]

It goes without saying that this has no resemblance to the disorderly, unorganized elections in ancient times, when—it’s hard to say this with a straight face—they couldn’t even tell before the election how it would come out. To establish a state on the basis of absolutely unpredictable randomness, blindly—could there be anything more idiotic? [...]

I don’t suppose it’s necessary to say that here, as in everything else, we have no place for randomness; there can’t be any surprises. [...]

we celebrate our elections openly, honestly, in the daylight. I see how everybody votes for the Benefactor and everybody sees how I vote for the Benefactor. And how else could it be, since everybody and I add up to the one We?

Anyone who disagrees with their fairy-tale vision of all mankind having equal outcomes, and free from the recognition of differences, is “a threat to democracy”. This is why Democrats’ rhetoric has led to efforts to censor, imprison, and even kill Donald Trump.

The 2018 Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy states that politicians like Trump have produced a “post-truth” populist politics, easily remedied by making voters better educated. Rousseau believed that:

If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good.

If not exposed to mis- and dis-information peddled by “divisive” populists like Trump, Democrats presume everyone will come to the same progressive conclusion. They believe themselves to be in possession of the means of making policies in everyone's rational self-interest, based on a presumption of universal human sameness. Populism is the art of returning contentious issues back to the realm of public discussion. Populists are therefore slowing down the rate at which policies which benefit everyone will be enacted. They are casting a kind of spell over the voting public, making them believe they are different and divided. For democracy to prevail, populists must be censored, banned, and persecuted. As Finley writes:

For the democratist, there are no genuine and meaningful differences among people. All of “our values” are finally reconcilable in the values that democratism holds to be true. Democratism leaves little room for diversity with regard to worldview and other important matters. The “shared recognition of universal rights” demands unquestioning acceptance, lest one be considered extreme, Fascist, or, in the language of yesteryear, “an enemy of the people”.

As such, democracy may only function when “experts” can censor those charged with spreading division, racist rhetoric, misinformation, or disinformation. As Bill Clinton’s court philosopher, John Rawls, insisted, the parameters of deliberation in democracy must be tightly regulated to uphold the liberal values credited with producing it. This means persecuting anyone not committed to the fiction that, due to their nature, human beings will produce exactly the same outcomes, and that inequality means oppression happened somewhere along the way — requiring government intervention to correct it.

This is why, in the name of protecting democracy, intelligence officials pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election; and why, throughout the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration leaned on Silicon Valley to censor critics of their vaccine mandates. This is why they bragged, in TIME Magazine, about “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” among a “well-funded cabal” to “fortify” the outcome in Biden's favor.

Trump’s principled opposition to the end goal of Democrat policies is enough to designate him a threat to democracy. This is why he was deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter. This is why his contesting the results of the 2020 election was deemed tantamount to insurrection. This is why, with cases like the first impeachment, or his possession of classified documents, Joe Biden can be guilty of the same or worse crimes, and not face prosecution. This is why his enemies recite the lie that he will destroy America as we know it, with full knowledge that it puts his life at risk. As JD Vance wrote, “The logic of [their] censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: put a bullet in his brain”. For Trump to survive till November, this liberal myth must be put to rest.