For the second time in as many months, an assassin targeted Donald Trump, and the left blamed … Donald Trump. It’s his violent rhetoric, you see, that is poisoning the body politic and causing everyone to go crazy. Or something like that.

Never mind that the second would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, had written a book in which he called on Iran to assassinate Trump, gave money to Democrats, and posted on X in April using the exact same language Democrats have been pushing for years – “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.”

David Frum, who we called scum in this space after he wrote in the immediate wake of the last assassination attempt that Trump reaped what he sowed, was back at it again. “For a decade, this dangerous political environment has been uniquely inflamed by Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric,” he wrote this week. Plus, he said, Trump supports gun rights. Implication? Trump had it coming.

Others, such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, put it more plainly: “Donald Trump brings a lot of this stuff on himself.”

The Trump campaign released a very long list of other blame-the-victim examples.

Yet, while the left holds Trump entirely responsible for the impact of his rhetoric, it always excuses its own hatemongering.

At a White House press briefing this week, Fox News’ Peter Doocy posed this question to Karine Jean-Pierre: “It’s been only two days since somebody allegedly tried to kill Donald Trump again, and you’re here at the podium in the White House briefing room calling him a threat. How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the President and the Vice President, and you, pick a different word to describe Trump other than ‘threat’?”

Her mind bogglingly obtuse response: “The question that you’re asking is … incredibly dangerous in the way that you’re asking it.”

That’s been the pattern for decades. Rush Limbaugh got blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing. Sarah Palin for the Gabby Giffords shooting. Despite the fact there wasn’t even a microscopic filament connecting them.

But when a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter targeted Republican lawmakers and very nearly killed one of them – after Sanders said Republicans are guilty of killing people for not supporting socialized health care – the left scratched its collective head about a motive. And when a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council precisely because it was on the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate list,” there wasn’t a peep about toning down the rhetoric.

The truth is that it’s the left that has always seen hatred and violence as weapon. Don’t think so? Here’s a quotation from one of the left’s great heroes, Che Guevara: “Hatred as the central element of our struggle! Hatred that is intransigent … hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold-blooded killing machine.”

It was Lyndon Johnson who ran an ad – commonly known as “Daisy”– suggesting that Barry Goldwater would unleash nuclear Armageddon. The 1964 commercial is widely credited with ushering in today’s era of vicious attack ads and political polarization.

The affable Ronald Reagan routinely came in for what were then unprecedented attacks by his opponents. Former Rep. William Clay once said that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” Esquire magazine ran an article saying Reagan supporters were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

In the years since, it didn’t matter who you were, or what your own rhetoric was like. If you were a conservative, it was open season for the left.

When Rick Scott was running for governor of Florida, former Rep. Paul Kanjorski – a Democrat – called him a “damn crook” and said Floridians should, “put him against the wall and shoot him.”  

Keith Olbermann, still a darling of the left, was for years paid handsomely by MSNBC to lob vicious, hate-filled rants at Republicans on a nightly basis. He once said of Sarah Palin that: “Madam, you are a clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation.”

The left regularly fantasized about assassinating George W. Bush. CNN contributor Rick Wilson once suggested that Melania Trump should “be Infected” with COVID-19. Democrats are the ones who perfected the art of Supreme Court nominee character assassination, starting with Joe Biden’s 1987 Robert Bork snuff hearings.

Today, not a day goes by when conservatives aren’t called racists, fascists, hatemongers, terrorists, bigots, ignoramuses who cling to guns and religion, deplorables, or, as Biden once called millions of Americans, semi-fascists. Conservative speakers, not liberal ones, get shouted down and assaulted on university campuses without consequence. Republican officials get harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes, and the assailants are cheered by Democrats.

And you want violent rhetoric? Don’t look to Trump. Here’s a 2.5 minute montage of Democrats – many of them leaders in the party and prominent media types – explicitly calling for violence.

Meanwhile, polls have shown that it’s those on the left, not the right, who are more likely to say that violence is justified to pursue political goals, something we’ve written about before. (See: “Will Left’s Violent Tendencies Lead To U.S. Breakup Or Dictatorship?”)

And a Rasmussen poll out this week finds that more than one in four Democrats (28%) think the country would be better off if Trump had been assassinated.

Left has gotten so used to such “eliminationist” rhetoric, as Paul Krugman once called it (referring, of course, to things said by Republicans that he didn’t like), that it doesn’t even register any more.

But woe to the Republican who points any of this out, or uses words to fight back. Because then leftists get in the fetal position and start primal-screaming “Hate Speech!” and “Violence!” and “Threat to Democracy!”

So, for decades, Republicans just took the abuse. Or cowered and begged forgiveness. Or tried to appease the mob.

For all his faults, Trump has, to his undying credit, refused to play this game. And that’s why the left – along with a smattering of Caspar Milquetoast Republicans – hate him more than they have ever hated any politician.

Could Trump tone down his rhetoric? Sure. But why should he go first?

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board