For the second time in two months, another deranged individual put himself in a position to try and make an attempt on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s life.
On Sept. 15th, a man who was later identified as 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, a native of Greensboro, was spotted by a Secret Service agent allegedly aiming an “AK-47-style” weapon at the former president while he was golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Routh, who was behind a chain-link fence, was said to have been between 300-500 yards away from Trump, whose shooting he reportedly planned to film with a GoPro. He was eventually located by law enforcement while driving on I-95 and was taken into custody.
In the aftermath of the second assassination attempt on Trump, we saw an appalling display of insensitivity and callousness come from some in the media and on the left who, incredibly, said Trump was either partially to blame or was asking for it based on his campaign rhetoric.
“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants,” NBC News anchor Lester Holt reported.
“Do you expect to hear anything from the Trump campaign about toning down the rhetoric?” MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt asked in another segment.
Meanwhile on CNN, presidential historian Tim Naftali declared that though he believed violence was not the answer, “when you dehumanize people, you make it easier for disturbed minds to do the wrong thing.”
Perhaps most appallingly, The Cincinnati Enquirer editorial board greenlighted the publication of a reader letter that suggested Trump “brings a lot of this stuff on himself.”
“There is no place in politics for violence. That said, the former president, Donald Trump, brings a lot of this stuff on himself,” the writer argued.
“When he continues to push lies about legal immigrants like the ones in Springfield, Ohio; when he continues to insist he was not the loser of the 2020 election; when he continues to spout how he wants to use our military to ‘round up’ and deport immigrants who are not white from this country, he brings the crazies out, and one of those crazies tries to shoot him,” they went on to say.
While this was a letter to the paper and not something the paper itself wrote, it was what I would call a dangerous normalization of the victim-blaming we were already seeing the weekend of the second Trump assassination attempt, where these types of claims were made with little to no pushback while some in the press were acting as though it was Trump’s responsibility to call for a dialing down of the rhetoric.
A few days after Routh aimed his weapon at Trump, we learned from his social media accounts that he had used the same type of rhetoric against Trump that we’ve heard from Democrats including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way,” Routh wrote in an April Twitter/X post.
“Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” Harris wrote in a Facebook post on April 3rd, in one of many examples.
Are Harris and Biden partly to blame for the latest attempt to assassinate Trump? I’ll leave that for readers to debate. But according to the left’s/media’s previously stated standards, which have been to suggest that mere criticism of public officials can lead to threats, they are.
Your rules, media and Democrats. Your rules.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.