Was the Assassination Attempt on Trump Predictable?

The assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump was horrific. It was also unsurprising. Anyone following politics with an intellectually honest lens shouldn’t be shocked by the attempt on Trump’s life. The 2000 election of George W. Bush over Al Gore sent leftists into a frothing rage from which they have yet to calm down. The 2016 election of Trump over Hillary Clinton caused many formerly reasonable people to suffer psychological breakdowns. For far too many Democrats, politics has become a win-at-all-costs blood feud. 

Democrats openly fantasized about assassinating President George W. Bush. The late Dr. Charles Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to describe “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” 

Trump Derangement Syndrome is not new. Leftists hate Trump because he threatens their power. As Trump himself said, “They’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just in the way.” 

Look at the left’s behavior since Trump descended that escalator in 2015. They spent every waking minute trying to convince Americans he is a monster. They demonized him in ways transcending normal human or political discourse. The same liberal Democrats and leftists who bring up election 2020 refuse to accept that Trump won in 2016. Hillary Clinton was supposed to be their anointed first woman Commander-In-Chief. Trump prevented that. The left never accepted his election. 

The left began by trying to tear down American institutions. They pushed to abolish the electoral college and institute a popular vote mandate — the very thing the Founding Fathers warned against. On the first full day of Trump’s presidency, liberals held a violent “resistance” rally, borrowing a term coined by Yasir Arafat to justify political violence. Celebrities including Madonna, Wynona Judd, Johnny Depp and others shrieked about harming Trump.

On the first full day of Trump’s presidency, liberals held a “resistance” rally, borrowing a term coined to justify political violence. Celebrities including Madonna, Wynona Judd, Johnny Depp and others shrieked about harming Trump. 

Leftist bloodlust briefly slowed six months into Trump’s presidency when a deranged leftist shot Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise. The Bernie Sanders supporter admitted his desire to kill as many Republicans as possible. Once Mr. Scalise began recovering, leftists returned to form. 

Trump’s first two years in office were consumed with Democrats insisting he was a spy for the Russian government. When that preposterous belief imploded, Trump was impeached over a phone call with a Ukrainian leader. When he was acquitted, the COVID pandemic arrived. As COVID was raging, the George Floyd riots were unleashed. Leftist groups created during Barack Obama’s presidency ran wild without consequences. Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Antifa burned everything in sight.

Having been stung by 2016, Democrats left nothing to chance in 2020. While the 2020 election was not “stolen,” it was rigged. Democrats in several swing states violated their own state constitutions in a desperate attempt to stop Trump. In Wisconsin, dropboxes were illegal. Nevertheless, dropboxes were put in Milwaukee, Madison and other Wisconsin Democrat strongholds. 

Trump was repeatedly accused of fomenting violence after the 2020 election. This was untrue. He went to court. When courts ruled against him, he appealed. He worked within the system. Then came the Jan. 6, 2021 events that Democrats milked for all they were worth. 

Until Jan. 6, political violence in America was almost exclusively leftist. The Weather Underground, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front and others engaged in leftist political violence. Radical environmentalists chained themselves to trees to stop development. Today they throw paint on priceless paintings and glue themselves inside art galleries in the name of fighting climate change. Leftist agitators block traffic and shut down bridges and roads in the name of leftist social causes. 

When there were no causes to promote, leftists invented tragedies to declare themselves victims and conservatives aggressors. Entire leftist movements were promoted and advanced based on fiction. The gay rights movement got a boost from the death of Matthew Shepard. Yet Matthew Shepard was not killed for being gay. He was a drug dealer killed in a deal gone bad. His sexuality was irrelevant to his death. Making him a leftist cause célèbre allowed his supporters to demonize conservatives. 

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was based on a lie. BLM formed when a white police officer killed a black man named Mike Brown. Mr. Brown was a violent criminal who robbed a liquor store. Brown tried to kill the officer, who used justified lethal force in self-defense. Brown’s last words—“Hands up, don’t shoot” — became a rallying cry, but he never uttered those words. His death was exploited to create a fictional crisis of white police officers murdering young black men. Actual death statistics exposed this supposed epidemic as fantasy.

The deaths of Matthew Shepard and Mike Brown allowed wealthy white liberals to invent a narrative of a Republican war on minorities. This made it possible for those in charge of leftist organizations to raise large sums of money to promote leftist causes. Gay people and black people were explicitly and falsely led to believe that white Republicans were plotting to kill them all.  

In 2012, then-Vice President Biden fanned the flames by telling a black audience that Republicans wanted to “put y’all back in chains.” 

Things got even more ridiculous with the 2019 Jussie Smollett hoax. Smollett was an actor who happens to be gay and black. He claimed he was physically beaten on Chicago’s South Side by a couple of white men yelling, “This is MAGA country.” Any conservative who questioned Smollett’s preposterous story was deemed racist and sexist. Because it happened during Trump’s presidency, it was somehow Trump’s fault. 

The truth was that Smollett hired two black African immigrants to beat him up.  

Those who labeled Smollett a liar had their social media posts about him censored. On Facebook, I tried to joke that “Americans need more illegals and refugees to do the jobs Americans refuse to do … such as beating up Jussie Smollett.” 

That joke about outsourcing was considered a promotion of violence and punished with a 30-day Facebook ban.

As for Smollett, he was initially given a free pass from Cook County District Attorney Kim Foxx, after being telephoned by a friend of Smollett’s, former First Lady Michelle Obama. 

No matter how crazy the actions of the left, everything in life had to be blamed on Republicans, conservatives, and especially Trump. 

During the August 2020 George Floyd riots, an 18-year-old man named Kyle Rittenhouse used justifiable self-defense to shoot three people trying to kill him. The left labeled Mr. Rittenhouse a racist even though his victims were all Caucasian. Although the three people he shot were violent criminals and one was a convicted pedophile,  the media portrayed Rittenhouse as a cold-blooded murderer. When a jury quickly acquitted him, leftists seized upon the Rittenhouse verdict as evidence that white Republican men could murder with impunity as long as Trump was President.

Ridiculous commentary emanated from the 2022 Academy Awards. Actor Will Smith charged the stage and slapped comedian and emcee Chris Rock. The next day on “The View,” actress Joy Behar blamed Trump for the violent culture permeating America. Even by the low standards of “The View,” this was insane. A black Democrat attacked another black Democrat, yet somehow a white Republican who had been out of office for over one year was responsible for the violence.

Add the constant accusations that the Tea Party movement was violent. The movement stood for “Taxed Enough Already.” They wanted limited government. They were labeled white racists despite having many minority members. The Obama administration used the IRS to target Tea Partiers and bully them out of the political process.

These and plenty of other incidents fed into the media narrative that Republicans, particularly white male conservative Trump supporters, walked around with guns looking for minorities to physically harm or even kill. Meanwhile, leftists were tossing Molotov cocktails and setting businesses, cities and neighborhoods on fire. A complicit liberal media reached its nadir by describing a leftist riot with a building aflame as “mostly peaceful.” 

All Jan. 6 did was reduce left-wing violence from nearly 100% of all political violence down to 99%. Nearly 30 years ago, Eric Rudolph bombed abortion clinics and Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In the 30 years since, leftist violence has been the norm. Jan. 6 gave Democrats a lifeline, but it was also based on a false narrative. Trump told his supporters to approach the capitol “peacefully.” Democrats on their select committee hid exculpatory evidence and selectively edited tapes to put Trump in as damaging a light as possible. Democrats compared Jan. 6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust, another attempt to link Trump to Adolf Hitler. 

Voters were more concerned about inflation than about some alt-right doofuses acting like unruly South Beach Spring Breakers. 

Democrats thought winning in 2020 would end things, but Trump proved resilient. More galling to the left, by 2023 Trump’s policies were more popular than President Joe Biden’s policies. Rather than let voters decide the 2024 election, Democrats began a carefully coordinated lawfare campaign. Institutionally, Democrats tried abolishing the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and physically intimidating SCOTUS justices who issued conservative rulings. Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced his own assassination attempt as rioters targeted his home. On the lawfare side, Trump was indicted in several states on charges so thin that politically liberal constitutional scholars Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz recoiled.

Democrats thought winning in 2020 would end things, but Trump proved resilient. More galling to the left, by 2023 Trump’s policies were more popular than President Joe Biden’s policies.  

Most of the legal cases against Trump collapsed. Trump easily won the GOP nomination for the third straight presidential cycle. Trump then crushed Biden in the first 2024 general election presidential debate. 

Democrats and the few remaining Republican “Never-Trumpers” panicked. They had spent months and years labeling Trump as Hitler, a racist, a rapist, an insurrectionist, and a threat to democracy itself. Impeachment failed. Indicting him failed. Censoring him and his supporters on social media platforms failed when he built his own Truth Social site. Accusations that he had sympathized with Charlottesville Nazis, called our military “suckers and losers,” and told Americans to drink bleach were all debunked. Attempts to portray Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation fooled only the most rabid leftist partisans. Trump did not conspire with Vladimir Putin to make Hunter Biden smoke crack and cavort with call girls.

Panicked Democrats are now pretending to be shocked at the Biden mental health coverup that they themselves were part of covering up. Government secrecy is a threat to democracy we ignore at our peril.

Making matters worse, liberal media attempts to portray Trump as mentally unstable and Biden as cognitively functional have both been exposed as fraudulent. Panicked Democrats are now pretending to be shocked at the Biden mental health coverup that they themselves were part of covering up. Government secrecy is a threat to democracy we ignore at our peril. 

Desperate Democrats’ newest bogeyman is Project 2025. It would somehow allow conservatives to enslave minorities and end their lives. In reality, Project 2025 is a boring policy pamphlet created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. These people don’t murder Americans. They occasionally bore everyone not attending CPAC. This policy pamphlet is also somehow Trump’s fault despite his coming out against it. 

Democrats cannot run on their record, so their only hope of staying in office is to convince Americans that Trump and his supporters are genocidal madmen hellbent on annihilating them. 

There was only one way left to stop him from becoming President again. 

The shooter was a 20-year-old registered Republican who donated to Act-Blue, a Democrat superpac that funds leftist groups. 

The attempted murder of Trump that killed an innocent Pennsylvania rallygoer was the furthest thing from a surprise. It was the inevitable result of a leftism bereft of ideas, unable to govern, enraged at everything, and willing to use anything including violence to maintain power.

Eric Golub is a retired stockbrokerage and oil professional living in Los Angeles.