From my May 27 Las Vegas Review-Journal column on similarities between Trump and John F. Kennedy:
The most terrifying way in which Trump resembles Kennedy is in the bitter hatred that is directed at him by his opponents.
Kennedy was reviled by both the far left on college campuses and by the extreme far right. In the end, he was slain by a self-described Marxist who had spent 32 months in the Soviet Union.
There are no shortage of people who hate Trump enough that they'd be glad to see him killed.
Since that column appeared, we've seen:
- Comedian Kathy Griffin apologizing after appearing in a video holding what looked like a bloody head of Trump
- A New York play put on by the son of communists and funded by the New York Times depicting the assassination of Trump. The director claims the play disapproves of the assassination.
- Today, a gunman, apparently a Democratic political activist, opening fire on Republican congressmen playing softball and wounding at least one of them.
I'm not big on blaming entire political movements for the actions of lone crazies. There were plenty of fervent Bill Clinton-haters and Barack Obama-haters out there, too. But the kind of all-in, "resist!," breathlessness of the anti-Trump activism made this sort of thing entirely predictable. It reminds me a bit — not in a good way — of the vilification of Yitzhak Rabin before his assassination. I'm not saying people can't be vigorously and vociferously anti-Trump. But if you really believe that the guy (or congressional Republicans) is a fascist, or a Russian agent, who is going to take away health care from ten million poor sick people who need it, and pollute the environment to the point where the cities all are underwater, it is not that big a moral leap from that assumption to the next step, which is that anyone who stops him (or them) is a hero, no matter how violent the means. It'd be nice to find some way to lower the temperature.