The Real Threat

One of the following tweets is from a deranged psychopath who on Sunday was arrested after trying to assassinated former President Donald Trump. The other is from the current President of the United States. Try to guess which is which:

Tweet 1: “Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything American stands for.”

Tweet 2: “Democracy is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.”

Give up? Can’t tell which one is from the President and which is from the would-be assassin? That’s the point; it’s impossible. So unhinged is mainstream Democrat rhetoric that it is indistinguishable from the rantings of a madman.

For the record, the first tweet was posted by the official @JoeBiden X account on June 28^th while the second was posted by Ryan Wesley Routh, the attempted assassin, on April 22^nd, and there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.

Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has called Trump a “threat to democracy” dozens of times on social media and in traditional media appearances, and the idea that Trump is a unique and unprecedented danger to both American self-governance and global stability has been Democrats’ main argument against him for nearly a decade.

Routh was rather plainly radicalized by this and, after trying (and failing) to save the world by fighting with various mercenary groups in Ukraine, set his sights on the Trump International Golf Club, where he thought he could take out the single greatest threat to freedom the world has ever seen.

A violent sociopath, Routh saw the world through the apocalyptic prism of an eternal battle between good and evil. He, of course, is fighting for good and those he perceived as his enemies are pure evil. His psychosis made him particularly susceptible to Democrat messaging that the world’s ultimate evil is Donald Trump.

For two consecutive election cycles, the party has pushed this as its primary electoral argument: “Sure, our inflationary policies have crippled the economy and the millions of illegal immigrants they have allowed into the country are causing irreparable harm, but Trump will destroy everything you care about if you elect him!”

Two years ago, as the midterm elections kicked into high gear after Labor Day weekend, President Biden gave a now-infamous speech in which he outlined the grave stakes.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he said, bathed in blood red lighting as his tone grew more ominous with each word he uttered.

It didn’t seem like it at the time, but this was a seminal moment in American history. Never before had a President so viciously demonized half of the country he leads. They didn’t just hold foolish opinions on issues; they will end America as we know it.

Such persecutory delusions are a hallmark of psychosis, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that they’re shared by a would-be assassin. What’s even more troubling than how close he got to Trump, however, is how widespread his delusion seems to be.

How many Democrats really, truly believe that Trump is an existential threat to this country? Perhaps far more than we sane people would like to admit. Fortunately, most of them can keep their paranoid psychosis in check, but two of them in the past sixty days could not, and both very nearly succeeded in ending Trump’s life (the first by just a few millimeters).

Both viewed Trump as an existential threat, and both were radicalized by a near-constant drumbeat of Democrat messaging implying that such a threat needed to be eliminated by any means necessary.

This goes far beyond inflammatory and dangerous political rhetoric; it seems like an intentional effort to rally the crazies. It is dangerous, it is sociopathic, and it must stop.

But you and I both know that it won’t. And that’s the scariest thing of all.