(This was originally posted 4/2/17)
1. Almost all presidents have at least one serious attempt on their lives. It's just a part of the job. That said, Donald Trump is in demonstrably more danger than any other president in recent history.
- There was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump even before the election
- Several people have jumped the White House fence, some with backpacks
- Members of the administration have been accosted in public
- The Secretary of Education is, or was, under the protection of Federal Marshals
- There are weekly bomb threats against Trump Tower in NY
- Leftists have violently attacked Trump supporters before, and since, the election
- Prominent Democrats have actually called for violence*
- Dozens of states and cities have openly seceded from federal immigration laws
- Democrats have been claiming Trump is illegitimate since election day
- The level of hatred and obstruction is unprecedented in modern times
2. Consider the rhetoric:
- He is: a tyrant, a despot, a racist, a bigot, a dictator, a liar, a demagogue, grossly unqualified, lacking in character, ugly, an idiot, a braggart, a buffoon, a monster, foul tongued, indecent, disrespectful to women, vulgar, intellectually lazy, a white supremacist, deranged from syphilis, disrespectful of freedom of the press.
- If he is elected we will: leave the country, secede, refuse to follow federal laws.
- He should: be assassinated, be impeached, be removed, go to hell.
- His way of speaking and writing is: silly, slip-shod, loose-jointed, lacking in the simplest rules of syntax, coarse, devoid of grace, filled with glittering generalities.
- He and his entire cabinet are not equal to the occasion and are full of incapacity and rottenness.
There is a big difference between hate and dissent. Dissenters claim that the other side is wrong. Haters claim that the other side is evil, and when it comes to evil, no tactic is off-the-table. Murder, violence, lawlessness, civil disobedience... all justified in the face of evil.
3. In many frightening ways Trump and Lincoln are walking the same path.
Lincoln was considered evil and hated by Democrats because he was a threat to slavery. Slavery had become an entrenched entitlement for southern Democrats. It was legal, it went back generations, and it was very lucrative. Lincoln was trying to kill the Democrat's golden goose.
Trump is a similar threat to entrenched Democrat entitlements. Among them: Socialized Medicine, open borders, control of the vast bureaucracies, union power, illegals able to vote, etc. These are today's Democrat golden geese.
Unless I'm missing something, no entitlement has ever been completely ended without a civil war.
4. Four Presidents have been killed in office, three Republicans and one Democrat. The odds of being killed in office are 3 times greater for a Republican, and the odds of taking a bullet are 1.6 times greater. Of the 8 shot, 5 were Republicans and 3 were Democrats. All presidents who were killed in office were done so from the Left (and that's not a reference to the direction of the bullets).
- Lincoln, a Republican, was killed by a Democrat actor
- Garfield, a Republican, was killed by a lawyer who spent time on a "free sex" commune (though he was nominally from the same party)
- McKinley, a Republican, was killed by an anarchist
- Kennedy, a Democrat, was killed by a communist
Of course, all were probably deranged, but it is noteworthy that no president has ever been killed by a conservative, or even by someone to the right of them.
5. Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president to be shot. In many ways Trump and Reagan, (along with others, most notably Lincoln) share at least one interesting trait: they were seen as ideologues. By that I mean they had specific issues they were committed to and were willing to unapologetically fight for. In Reagan's case it was broadly getting government off the back of the people, lowering taxes, deregulation, standing up to foes. Trump, though a Democrat for most of his life, seems particularly ideological when it comes to similar things: enforcing borders, reducing the "administrative state", restoring the rule of law, fighting jihad, etc.
Like Trump, Reagan was hated by Democrats, painted as evil, dumb, dangerous, crazy, etc. Reagan was shot in March of his first term.
6. The Russian collusion meme is part of the whole attempt to label Trump evil. It was Ronald Reagan who labeled Russia (USSR at the time) the "evil empire". Democrats always scoffed at that characterization. Remember the famous debate exchange between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, where Romney singled out Russia as our "top geopolitical foe"? Obama snarked, "The 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back". Now the tune has changed because Democrats figured out they could augment their characterization of Trump as evil by tying him to the "evil empire". By doing so they have been able to peel off some of his weaker, hawkish, GOP support like McCain, Graham, et al.
7. The government, regardless of who's in power, t is largely a Democrat institution. That includes the Secret Service, FBI, career DOJ, etc. These unionized, mostly Democrat, government entities are responsible for the President's safety. Though they are usually considered to be above politics, will they perform as they should if they become convinced the man they are protecting is evil? Will they take a bullet for a man they are told daily is Hitler?
** The anti-Lincoln Tradition
"Lincoln is an Idiot"
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