Democrats shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s would-be assassins

What happens when you continually demonize someone as “Hitler,” insist that he is “a dictator” and “a threat to democracy?”

Why, you get chaps like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two months ago. Yesterday, Crooks was joined by Ryan Wesley Routh, a self-described “revolutionary.” Routh who showed up at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach with an AK-style rifle and a GoPro video camera. The Secret Service espied him in the underbrush a few hundred yards from President Trump. He fled the scene after the agents opened fire on him but was soon apprehended by the local police. 

A couple hours after that “protective incident,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted this incitement on X:

Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025.

We must stop them.

Stop them how, exactly, Hakeem? 

And how about stopping with the blatant lies? Neither Donald Trump nor “MAGA Republicans” (what is an “extreme” MAGA Republican?) have called for a “national abortion ban.” Indeed, Trump has explicitly repudiated the idea. That, after all, was the whole point of the Dobbs decision. It put paid to Roe v. Wade in order to return the issue of abortion to the individual states, where it belongs. 

Nor is Jeffries correct in talking about “Trump’s Project 2025.” Trump and his campaign have consistently disavowed the initiative (which, by the way, is simply a plan to help Trump, should he win, staff his administration).

But Jeffries’s “by any means necessary” rhetoric (“We must stop them”) is just business as usual for Democrats. They have been screaming for seven years that their chief political opponent is “Hitler” or worse — and should not be surprised when their irresponsible (and untrue) charges are acted upon by murderous if unstable lowlifes like Thomas Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh.