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As I write, the information in the public domain regarding the perpetrator is still sparse. The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed shortly after firing his lethal shots. The public is therefore left to speculate about his motives.
However, what we do not need to speculate about is the climate created and cultivated by Donald Trump’s political enemies. America is polarized, toxic, and politically close to a breaking point in part because the country’s liberal political, cultural, and media elite never accepted Trump’s legitimacy as the country’s president. //
For years they have proclaimed Trump to be a danger to democracy and demonized his voters as witting or unwitting fascists. The May 16 edition of the once-revered New Republic depicted Trump as Hitler on its front cover.
“We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster,” wrote editor Michael Tomasky, “for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. … But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it.” Trump, argued Tomasky, was “damn close enough” to being an American Hitler, “and we’d better fight.”
The argument that Trump posed a Hitler-level threat to American democracy can be traced back to the first outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome among left-leaning journalists in 2016. What made the argument so malignant was that it justified using all means possible to disrupt Trump’s presidency and to prevent his re-election. //
The Democratic Party is in a mess today because they failed to do what a losing party in a major democracy is supposed to after it loses an election: conduct a thorough autopsy and get to the bottom of all the factors that lead to its defeat. That is supposed to be the main point of the years in opposition—to figure out what went wrong and come back equipped with insight, resources, and policy proposals to attract the voters.
Instead, after 2016, the Democrats invested their money, time, energy, and media ties into an effort to trash Trump’s presidency and thwart his bid for a second term. It seemed to work. They won the 2020 election.
But after 2020 the Democrats did not settle down to govern and bring a divided nation together. Under the stewardship of an elderly and superficially moderate president, they continued to wage rhetorical and legal jihad against former president Trump.