Are political assassination attempts the new normal?

President Trump survived a second assassination attempt.

If you told Americans a few months ago that this is where we would be today, few would have believed you. Why would they? Prior to Trump’s fateful July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the idea that either candidate would face a serious attempt on his or her life seemed unthinkable. Yet it has happened not once, but twice since then. This raises a dreadful question: Are assassination attempts are becoming the new normal for American politics?

The second attempt on Trump’s life occurred on Sunday, September 15, at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course. As Trump played a few rounds, Secret Service agents scanned the area for potential threats, eventually noticing the muzzle of a rifle protruding from the bushes at the outskirts of the course. An agent fired a few shots at the suspect, who hopped into a vehicle and fled, leaving behind the weapon, equipment, and a GoPro camera. He was later apprehended by law enforcement and identified as Ryan Wesley Routh.

Liberal radicalization is real, and it shows no sign of stopping — even after two assassination attempts.

While Thomas Crooks, the Butler shooter, remains a mystery with an unclear background, beliefs, and motives, more is known about Routh. He appears to be a die-hard liberal, driven by the same anti-Trump complaints frequently heard from the corporate left-wing media.

Curiously, Routh was profiled by the New York Times in 2023 alongside other American volunteers in Ukraine. The article named Routh as a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, who spent a few months in Ukraine in 2022 and was “seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban.” Routh’s sketchy scheme involved illegally moving these Afghan soldiers from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine.

Although Routh’s social media accounts have been suspended, conservative sleuths were able to preserve some of his posts. In an X post from April, Routh tagged @POTUS and wrote:

Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free. Trumps should be MASA… make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.

Routh also donated to Democratic candidates 19 times during the 2020 election.

The press has tried to obscure Routh’s political leanings, noting that he is not registered with any political party and that he reportedly voted for Trump in 2016. But this isn’t difficult. We can say without exaggeration that the man responsible for the second attempt on Trump’s life is an ideologically committed liberal terrified that Trump intends to end American democracy for good.

Of course, that is a ridiculous fear. Trump doesn’t intend to become a fascist dictator. His enemy isn’t “democracy” — it’s the deep state, those unelected bureaucrats responsible for steering our country off course. But through the power of the media, that very deep state has succeeded at convincing a large number of Americans that its stranglehold on our country and “democracy” are synonymous. Ryan Routh’s attempt on Trump’s life is a direct consequence of this.

After the events of September 15, we cannot dismiss the Butler assassination attempt as a one-off. It wasn’t just a freak occurrence — it was the first of who knows how many attempts on Trump’s life. The corporate media and political establishment in this country had the opportunity after Butler to lower the temperature, moderate their rhetoric, and cease to act as if Trump was on the verge of dissolving the Reichstag. But they didn’t, and we now find ourselves in a dark place, a new normal where assassination attempts on anti-establishment candidates (and in this case, former presidents) have become commonplace.

The powers that be have no intention of turning down the temperature. For hysterically promulgating dangerous falsehoods about President Trump and his supporters, they are to blame for the shift toward political violence in America. Liberal radicalization is real, and it shows no sign of stopping — even after two assassination attempts.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the left to change its ways. Its concern is power, not maintaining once-sacred norms in America like “don’t assassinate your political rivals.” Only by achieving lasting political victory over these ghouls will the nightmarish new normal they have birthed be undone.

That, admittedly, is a tall order. But it is all the more reason to vote for Trump this November.