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.
Editor’s note: The following column was first published in Restoration on Substack.
At Restoration, we wholeheartedly and without reservation condemn the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Unfortunately, one audience member was reported dead on Saturday night and two others were critically injured. We pray for them and their loved ones.
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.
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The Biden administration and other political leaders have conveyed their condemnation of the shooting and issued statements of well wishes to Trump and his family. That may be a first sign of self-awareness and a step in the right direction, but it sounds hollow and disingenuous.
The very same leaders of the Democratic Party, along with a cohort of the Republican Party who labeled themselves Never Trumpers, and a swathe of what was once the mainstream media, crossed the line of political and public decency by framing Donald Trump as a monster and his supporters (roughly half the nation) as monster-worshipping deplorables ready to hand our democratic republic to a dictator.
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.
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Hillary Clinton formally conceded her loss to Trump in 2016. But the Democratic Party inwardly denied the legitimacy of his victory. What followed that concession speech was a sustained campaign of scheming to undermine the 45th President.
There were calls to change the electoral system on the grounds that Clinton had won more of the actual votes cast; the pseudo-feminist Women’s March; the invention of the "collusion with Russia" hoax; the invocation of the 25th Amendment; the spurious claim that Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021; and, most recently, the carefully orchestrated abuse of the civil and criminal systems to wage "lawfare" against his candidacy in 2024.
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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 led 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.
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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. Just before the midterms in 2022, President Biden and his team decided to gin up the psychodrama in their circles with the so-called "battle for the soul of the nation" speech.
Millions of ordinary Americans who had voted for Trump in the past and might vote for him in the future were told that they "threatened the very foundations of the nation."
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The two years since that speech were spent on insisting that under no circumstances would a Trump election victory be acceptable. The lawfare and media campaign against him intensified. The calculation became that if Trump could be convicted of a crime (any crime) and labeled a felon, the Democratic incumbent would win the election.
Sure enough, a court in New York found Trump guilty of all 34 crimes he was charged with in a case that legal experts admitted would never have been brought against anyone who was not Donald Trump. In other words, 34 strands of spaghetti were thrown at him and all 34 stuck.
All the while, the Democrats and their media surrogates overlooked the reality that their incumbent and intended nominee was too old and cognitively impaired to win the general election, while his Vice President, the most prominent DEI hire in the country, was too talentless to do any better.
With less than four months to go until the election, the Democrats are in the grip of an internal power struggle of their own making. Now the attempted assassination of Trump almost certainly dooms them to defeat, whether they nominate Biden, Harris or some other candidate.
After President Ronald Reagan narrowly avoided assassination in March 1981, his approval rating surged from 60 to 70%. It would be remarkable if Trump did not reap a comparable political reward for his evident courage and defiance in the moments after his brush with death.
A great many people who wished Donald Trump ill over the past eight years also dodged a metaphorical bullet on Saturday night. Had Trump been killed, his death would have been on the consciences of everyone who ever called him Hitler. I shudder to imagine the political aftermath of such a nightmarish event.
The advice I would give them all as they prepare for their party’s likely defeat on November 5 is simple: This time, do the right thing after you lose. Instead of demonizing the guy who beat you, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourselves this simple question: Was this result what we deserved for four years of failed policies on immigration, inflation, and national security – and for eight years of smearing Donald Trump as a Nazi?
