Assassination Attempts Are The Logical Result Of Left’s Narrative

Despite a second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in two months, Democrats refuse to relinquish their extremist rhetoric. This inciting rhetoric persists because a fixation on violence pervades the left. More than a political strategy, Democrats’ extremist rhetoric is the product of the leftist ideologies that now rule them.

President Joe Biden kicked off 2024 with a Pennsylvania speech saying “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.” In the ensuing months, Biden did not let up. 

Even after the first assassination attempt on July 13 in Butler Country, Pennsylvania, Democrats’ rhetoric against Donald Trump did not abate. Just two days after the shooting, Biden again called Trump “a threat to democracy.” 

Following a second assassination attempt on Trump in Florida, Democrats continue to press the “threat to democracy” line: Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said “I think we should be clear that he is a threat to democracy.” She is hardly alone.

Needless to say, had circumstances been reversed, Trump would be enduring unmitigated outrage from Democrats. Yet hypocrisy should not obscure the fact that the left who now dominate the Democrat Party have a storied past of political violence.

Marxist View of Violence

Marxism, the classic ideology of the left, sees all human history as a sequence of conflicts between classes. According to Karl Marx, the sequence does not end until the proletariat overthrow capitalism.

The classic leftist view not only makes violence endemic to society; it makes violence acceptable when wielded in pursuit of what the left sees as the inevitable revolution. Marxist rhetoric reflects this acceptance.

As Mao Zedong said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”  The godfather of the American left’s professional provocateurs, Saul Alinsky, in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, summarizes Lenin’s approach to violence when the Bolsheviks still lacked the means to carry it out: “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” 

Today’s woke ideology is a bastardization of classical Marxism. In her White Album’s essays of the 1970s, Joan Didion aptly described what the woke movement would adopt: “the notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, ‘named’ and so brought into existence.”

The woke movement substitutes amorphous “identity groups” for Marx’s rigid “classes,” while retaining Marxism’s belief in universal conflict. And the woke movement’s rationale for violence is also the same as its Marxist forebears: the oppressed are justified in every form of their resistance.

As their violence has been thus justified, so it has been unleashed nationwide and on every conceivable issue. 

Violence is endemic to the left’s prevailing ideologies, both classic and contemporary. Once the mind is set so, it becomes a mindset. It is only natural that it becomes embedded in their rhetoric. Thinking that way, they speak that way.

Trump As Oppressor

Six years ago, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., railed against members of the Trump administration: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet … you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

The left will not eschew violence because they see it as the legitimate response to the oppression they imagine all around them. When they see Americans rightly condemn it, they refuse to acknowledge it for what it is. When they can no longer ignore it, they refuse to condemn it. When it occurs in conjunction with a cause their mindset sees as the oppressed confronting their oppressor, it overrides the obviousness of its atrocity.

A blind eye exists to the left’s overheated rhetoric against Trump. Having cast Trump in the role of oppressor, they cannot describe him otherwise — even as a second assassination attempt underscores once again their rhetoric’s inherent danger. 

For the left — and therefore for the Democrat Party they now control — Trump remains “a threat to democracy,” even in the face of democracy’s literal threat: twice nearly depriving half of Americans of their right to vote for the candidate of their choice.  

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.