Menacing invective against Trump creates scary climate
Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has stated on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.
In March 2018, Biden said, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gymand beat the hell out of him.’ ”
A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.
“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”
Had former Vice President Dick Cheney ever dared to say something similar of President Obama, what would the media reaction have been?
Recently, Sen. Cory Booker, DN. J., another presidential candidate, went further:
“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out- of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.”
Democratic presidential candidates always try to sound further left than their primary rivals. Likewise regarding beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.
The current candidates are just following the sick showboating of Hollywood celebrities.
A month before Trump was elected, actor Robert De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Later, De Niro doubled down with a series of “F— Trump” outbursts.
This is especially dangerous in the aftermath of progressive zealot and Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson’s 2017 attempt to assassinate Republican congressmen at a practice for a charity baseball game. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was shot and nearly killed and three people were injured.
Donald Trump is a controversial president, no doubt. He replies to his critics with strong, often inflammatory invective.
Yet the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president is lowering the bar of assassination, and it will haunt the country long after Trump is gone.
On Trump inauguration day, singer Madonna told a large crowd outside the WhiteHouse that she had thought of blowing it up.
A fewmonths later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.
Since then, Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke and Larry Wilmore have discussed or demonstrated ways to kill the president.
We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the reelection campaign and second presidential term of George W. Bush.
A few columnists, documentary filmmakers and novelists went well beyond calling Bush a fascist, racist, Nazi and war criminal, and imagined his assassination.
But we are now well beyond even that rhetorical violence.
Trump and his critics often go at it relentlessly in interviews, in Twitter wars, and on television and radio. No insult seems too petty for Trump to ignore.
Yet progressives like Biden and Booker seem to think that by bragging of wanting to do violence to the president, they will rev up their base and win attention, as if physical violence is justified by Trump’s unorthodox presidency.
Nonetheless, the current climate is becoming scary. Those who brag of wanting to violently attack the president should worry about where their boasts will finally lead if any of the thousands of James Hodgkinsons in America take such threats seriously and act upon them.
Victor Davis Hanson is a syndicated columnist.