The man who intended to murder former President Donald Trump on Sept. 18 has explained in his own words why he wanted to do it. The words aren’t only his, though—they’re also the slogans and cliches of Trump’s Democratic opponents, virtually verbatim.

Months ago, Ryan Routh left a letter with a friend in case his assassination attempt failed. That letter is now in prosecutors’ hands, and court filings have made some of its contents public.

What’s been released so far makes Routh’s political motives clear—he saw Trump as dangerously unfit for the presidency and a threat to peace. Routh was especially incensed Trump terminated former President Barack Obama’s deal with Iran. Trump, he wrote, “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”

America’s president, according to the would-be killer, “must at bare minimum embody the moral fabric that is America, and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity.” Such syrupy banalities might not drive a man to murder, but they show what was going on in this attempted murderer’s mind. He took deadly seriously what people who aren’t deranged recognize as partisan hype.

Yet there are a great many disturbed persons at large in America today, and Routh is the second one to hatch plans to put a bullet in Trump. His letter, addressed “Dear World,” calls for others to follow his example—and proffers a reward for doing so.

“It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.”

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump’s legion of Democratic and ex-Republican detractors have supplied the premises for stopping the former president by any means possible. After all, if democracy truly is at stake in November, voters themselves must be suicidal even to consider voting for Trump.

To save democracy in such an emergency might well seem to call for extreme measures of a sort no politician would dare endorse—but that a true believer might be prepared to hazard. Harris, Biden and other Democratic leaders are quick to lament political violence; they have a responsibility to do more, however, by acknowledging that whatever their differences with Trump, his election does not mean the end of constitutional government.

President Trump was not a tyrant and isn’t poised to become one if reelected, and slaying him is nothing like justifiable tyrannicide or striking a blow for democracy. If Democrats could bring themselves to say this, they would do wonders for the emotional health of some of their own supporters—and might save lives, including but not only Trump’s.

Routh was not simply a maniac: His planning was meticulous, calculated. The chilling thing about his letter is that it’s not a mindless, stream-of-consciousness rant: It’s an assassin’s manifesto written in the bland language of ordinary anti-Trump discourse.

Like Routh in his letter, in the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden and New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand described Trump as a menace to America’s “moral fabric.” “One of the worst things about President Trump … is he’s torn apart the moral fabric of who we are,” Gillibrand said in one Democratic debate, while Biden accused Trump of shredding “America’s invisible moral fabric.”

Routh’s “kind, caring and selfless” description of a good president—one he presumably wouldn’t murder—sounds generic yet tracks with Harris endorsement of Biden four years ago as “kind and endlessly caring” and possessed of “selfless courage.”

Those words are obviously not incitements to violence: They simply testify to how little original thinking was taking place in Routh’s head. In the empty space between his ears was a great echo chamber reverberating with whatever he heard from Democrats and the anti-Trump hype machine.

He also picked up formulas from the anti-Israel left: “Stand with humanity” is a slogan trotted out by the recently defeated Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, for example, and other critics of Israel’s war with Hamas. “Elected officials should stand for humanity, not violent PACs” like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Bowman posted on X in May.

As for likening Trump to a child, that’s a routine trope for Democrats, with Harris adviser David Plouffe telling Politico last month, “We talk about (Trump) like a child.”

Yet Routh wasn’t just soaking up the syllables of anti-Trump rhetoric—he was internalizing a mindset that presents Trump as an enemy of humanity itself, not only immature but malevolent.           

Most of the time, exaggerated political rhetoric is harmless. Democrats have created an extraordinary climate of fear around Trump, however, that feeds into homicidal fantasies—and if they don’t weigh their words more carefully, more violence will follow from the likes of Routh.

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