Are Political Assassinations Ever Justified? History Says Yes.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump raises hard questions about political violence in a dying democracy
In the opening minutes of a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last Saturday, a 20-year-old gunman named Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to kill Donald J. Trump, former president, current Republican nominee, and the undisputed leader of a radical right-wing political movement dripping in undisguised contempt for democracy. Perched on a rooftop just outside the Secret Service’s internal security perimeter, Crooks sprayed bullets from his father’s AR-15 style assault rifle, grazing Trump’s ear, and coming within millimeters of ending the former president’s life. One man was killed in the botched hit, Corey Comperatore, and two others were critically injured. For his part, the would-be assassin was “neutralized” by Secret Service counter-snipers moments after opening fire.
What are we to make of this stunning act of political violence? For one, it failed miserably. The primary practical effect has been to supercharge Trump’s political prospects in a campaign he’s already dominating. But what about the larger moral and political questions? These are far more difficult to answer.
As America began digesting the assassination attempt, I noticed that many of the same journalists and politicians who had only recently been warning that Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy, were now suddenly issuing standard pre-baked denunciations of political violence, alongside their “thoughts and prayers.” This was all a bit disorienting, though not at all surprising. After all, political violence is antithetical in a healthy democracy, the very opposite of resolving political questions at the ballot box, and must be condemned.
Then again, our democracy is hardly healthy. It’s barely breathing.
More to the point, if Trump really is such a uniquely dangerous historical figure, intent on dismantling American democracy and establishing himself as a strongman atop its ruins, does that not perhaps change how we should view this attempt on his life? History suggests that it might.
Nevertheless, everyone from President Biden to the media personalities on CNN immediately condemned the failed hit as unambiguously unAmerican and morally indefensible, likely to pry a divided country further apart. Joe Biden called the botched hit “sick,” and decried political violence in a country where the “power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”
And yet, this formulation seems to elide the fact that Trump himself has consistently embraced, fueled, and deployed violence, or rather the threat of violence, throughout his political career. His dark rhetoric crackles with an undercurrent of rage and brutality, which he directs at his various adversaries, both real and imagined.
In 2016, Trump warned that “Second Amendment people” might kill Hillary Clinton; he mocked Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after the FBI disrupted a plot to kidnap and kill her; he denigrated Paul Pelosi, attacked in his home by a hammer wielding extremist, as the victim of a sexual misadventure; he routinely and effusively praises the world’s bloodthirstiest foreign dictators, from Kim Jong-un to Vladimir Putin.
The list goes on and on. Trump’s language is utterly vicious.
Of course, Trump used actual violence to disrupt certification of his loss in the 2020 election, when his supporters violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol on his behalf, nearly lynching his own vice president, Mike Pence, who Trump said probably deserved it for refusing to throw out the election. He now refers to the January 6 attackers as “martyrs,” and has promised to pardon them en masse if reelected. At his campaign rallies, he routinely plays the J6 Prison Choir singing the Star Spangled Banner from prison, a bizarre musical celebration of antidemocratic political terror.
Trump has systematically assaulted our democratic norms, institutions, elections, and the rule of law itself. He has wielded the specter of political violence since the beginning of his political career, a tendency that’s only grown sharper and more unrestrained over time. Now, that violence seems to have briefly escaped his grasp, and for the rest of us, it is perhaps complicating our reaction to his attempted assassination.
Cognitive dissonance
Republicans quickly honed in on this mental discrepancy, preempting the confusion about how to characterize this assassination attempt to score political points, and further solidify Trump’s narrative of martyrdom at the hands of an evil deep state intent on silencing him. J.D. Vance, Trump’s new vice presidential running mate and loyal attack dog, summed the cognitive dissonance up nicely in a post blaming Joe Biden and the Democrats for the failed hit. His comment goes to the heart of the issue.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” he posted on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
It’s almost as if Vance was daring Democrats to agree with him, and thus lend some moral justification to the act itself. The question, then, is this: if Trump is actually an “authoritarian fascist,” would his assassination then be justified? History tells us, emphatically, that the answer is yes, if only in retrospect, amid the bloody aftermath tyrants leave in their wake.
Notably, Vance was once one of Trump’s sharpest critics, calling him “cultural heroin.” Publicly, he called Trump a “reprehensible” con-artist, an “idiot,” and a “moral disaster.” He privately compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, a comparison that feels more and more apt as times goes on, particularly after Trump’s recent claim that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. In another striking similarity, both men led failed coup d’etat’s, and escaped real punishment for their crimes.
In any case, Hitler survived numerous assassination attempts. In one of the more infamous attempts, a 36-year old carpenter named Georg Elser planted a time-bomb in a wall in the Bürgerbräukeller in 1939, targeting the dictator at the annual celebration of his failed Beer Hall Putsch. Unfortunately, Hitler left early and the explosion missed him by only 13 minutes, killing 8 and wounding 62. Elser was arrested by the Gestapo, and ended up in Dachau, where he was held for five years, before being slaughtered a month before the German surrender.
The point, though, is that Georg Elser is now remembered as a hero and a German patriot, lionized in films, books, and the larger historical record. Likewise, Wehrmacht officer Claus von Stauffenberg is remembered as a martyr for his own attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944 in a conference room at the Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg was played by Tom Cruise in the film Valkyrie, detailing his assassination attempt, which injured Hitler but did not kill him, the suitcase bomb’s power having been blunted by a thick wooden table.
In short, when ruthless autocrats, themselves authors of terrifying political violence, lose control of the brutality they unleash, it often comes back to bite them. When that happens, it’s difficult not to entertain the idea that perhaps it’s justified. In Hitler’s case, no one would dispute such a notion.
If Donald Trump wins the upcoming election, an eventuality which appears increasingly likely, against an aging and badly weakened Joe Biden, and establishes a right-wing dictatorship in the United States, as he’s shown every inclination to do, this assassination attempt may appear in a very different light later on. Dictators tend to leave incredible suffering, death, depravity, and pain in the countries they rule, much of it designed to enrich themselves and their cronies, and keep themselves in power indefinitely.
There’s every reason to believe the United States will suffer immensely if Trump successfully dismantles our democratic system, along with the world, given America’s position as the guarantor of global security from Europe to Asia. As goes America, so goes the world, as they say.
Of course, with that said, I must be clear that I do not condone political violence in any case whatsoever. The ends never justify the means, and even a child knows that violence begets more violence. Tragically, though, not everyone subscribes to that quaint notion, particularly in an America ripped apart by the cancer of Trumpism, and which appears ready to descend further into his madness.
Very unconfortable, conflicting but necessary questioning.
Because I believe this whole “assassination attempt” was a setup, I don’t read it as political violence. My belief is that trump himself was in on it from its inception, and would provide him a greater Christian martyr vibe and victimization status.
It’s so easy to blame the “Deep State” for trying to end his presidential ambitions, isn’t it? Who else but Biden and the Marxist Communists would have even considered such a public display of their hatred for him?
Solidifying the trumpublican vote and regaining some of the doubtful independents was well worth a scratch on the ear. It may have been the October Surprise arriving early.
Which only makes me wonder what they have up their sleeves for October.