From One Assassination Attempt to the Next: Mainstreaming Violence Against a President

Same Old, Same Old: Target Trump

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt—this time in full view of the Washington press corps.

The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump. After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall—and that he might see possible violence outside it.

Indeed, protesters ringed the hotel. In grimly prescient fashion, the usual sort of crowd that night was channeling John Wilkes Booth—sic semper tyrannis—with placards reading “Death to Tyrants.”

They again almost got their wish.

All three of the would-be Trump shooters—along with Charlie Kirk’s murderer—fit the predictable profile of arrested-development, deranged leftists. They apparently sought to reify the popular Democrat hatred of Trump and his supporters, thereby imagining themselves entering the pantheon of revolutionary heroes.

So too, not long ago, did the would-be killer of Trump, Austin Tucker Martin, storm Mar-a-Lago in search of the absent president.