If Democrats didn’t believe they’d put former President Donald Trump in an assassin’s crosshairs the first time, they have no excuse for pleading innocent now. Ryan Routh, the suspect who hid in the bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club waiting for his shot at the former president—AK-47-style rifle at the ready, serial number filed off—wasn’t some 20-year-old without a political paper trail, like the first would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks.

Routh, 58 and now in custody, “frequently posted about politics” on X and other social media, had a Biden-Harris sticker on his truck, “and exclusively donated to Democratic candidates and causes dating back to 2019,” the New York Post reports.

He even featured in a New York Times story last year highlighting his efforts to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight against Russia in Ukraine. Willing to fight in Ukraine himself—though the Ukrainians didn’t want him or his dubious recruits—Routh wanted to be a man of action and was ready to kill for a cause.

But if the cause of democracy in Ukraine was worth killing for, what about the safety of democracy right here in America? Routh took both literally and seriously Democrats and progressives who say Trump is a threat to America’s institutions and the rule of law itself.

“DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose,” Routh wrote in a tweet to President Joe Biden in April. You can’t lose if your opponent is dead, and if democracy’s in danger, what conclusion does a desperate man of action draw?

Instead of moderating their rhetoric, Trump’s critics only doubled down after the first assassination attempt. On July 19, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) called Trump “an existential danger to our democracy.” In last week’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Trump of “attacking the foundations of our democracy.”

Democrats cut Trump no slack for telling his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” on Jan. 6, 2021, when some of them ran amok and invaded the Capitol. But Trump’s enemies don’t hold themselves to the same standard, when their own apocalyptic language incites a man like Routh to plan political murder.

Democrats have tried since 2016 to identify Trump with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. A man with a gun who wants to stop Putin might well think slaying Trump would save lives if, as Democrats and liberals in the media say, Trump is Putin’s catspaw.

No one thinks Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, was the cause of World War I by himself. The political climate that led to Princip’s violent act could have and sooner or later would have inspired someone else to do the same thing.

The political climate today that inspired Routh encourages others like him. The media have been recklessly uncritical of the incendiary characterizations of Trump that his opponents have trafficked in for years.

Listening to the Democrats or watching MSNBC, a terrified citizen might think the country is on the brink of dictatorship, and if ever there was a time for preemptive violence, it must be now. Democrats who denounce political violence while leading their supporters to think freedom is finished if Trump wins aren’t just hypocritical—they’re culpable.

Progressives must find ways to argue against Trump without giving ammunition to the paranoid and impulsive. Trump’s life is already in danger, but think about what happens if he wins.

On election night, what will people convinced Trump is a dictator do? Right now is the moment to lower the temperature, which should have happened after the former president almost lost his life to an assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Yet little changed after that horrific incident—Democrats apparently aren’t examining their consciences now, either. Rachel Vindman, sister-in-law of the Democrats’ nominee for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District—and the wife of Alexander Vindman, a key figure in the first impeachment effort against Trump in 2019—tweeted after Routh’s attempted ambush of Trump, “No ears were harmed.”

An audience member, Corey Comperatore, was killed in Butler on July 13, and the GOP nominee came within an inch of death: Is this something Democrats like the Vindmans find funny?

Too few of the Republican’s most strident critics take seriously the implications of their own words. They act as if Trump’s intemperance excuses greater intemperance on their part.

If Trump goes too far—and sometimes he does—Democrats have a duty not to go further still, but to pull back. They haven’t, so Trump remains in would-be assassins’ sights.

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