Donald Trump is a magnet for danger. Everyplace he goes, including to his own golf course, is at risk for becoming a danger zone

The Loneliness of Donald Trump echo opinion published in The New York Times by James Boule.

(Maine Writer: IOW, bone spurs again❓)

On Saturday night, April 25, at the gala White House Correspondents Association Dinner (WHCA), held in the Washington Hilton hotel, a gunman made an attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

WHCA another failed assassination attempt

This was the third such attempt in roughly two years. The first was in 2024, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania., where Trump — then still a candidate — sustained some minor injuries. A father named Corey Comperatore, age 50, was shot and killed when the gunman fired from a rooftop.  

Then, the next attempt took place the same year, this time at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., where the would-be assassin was stopped before he could get close. And then we have this most recent incident, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington.

To add to the catalog of recent political violence, there was the assassination of the former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband last summer, as well as the killing of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk at an event in Utah later last year.

Predictably, in the wake of Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life, the president’s allies immediately jumped to blame his political opponents for the incident.

“The deranged lies and smears against Trump, his family, his supporters have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Monday April 27th.

Trump added his two cents in an interview with CBS News: “I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is very dangerous. I really think it’s very dangerous for the country.” So, the Republican argument is simple. The more Democrats criticize Trump — the more they condemn him as a malign force in American politics — the more they put his life in danger.

But this argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

To start, even the most heated language coming from Democrats over the past few years falls well within the boundaries of ordinary political discourse in the United States. No elected Democratic leader has called for violence against Trump or his allies. All have condemned such violence when it has taken place. And you would be hard-pressed to find anything different among Democratic Party officials and liberal activists.

The same cannot be said about the political right, where figures like Steve Bannon muse about putting “heads on pikes” on “the two corners of the White House as a warning.” And it certainly cannot be said of the president.

Trump has been the most high-profile purveyor of violent language toward his opponents since he stepped onto the national stage in 2015, as a political contender.

Fantasies of violence against political enemies are, in fact, a defining feature of Trump’s political language.

During his first campaign for president, he pointed to the “Second Amendment people” when he wondered, aloud, whether anything could be done about a President Hillary Clinton. As the George Floyd protests consumed the country in the summer of 2020, Trump threatened violence against protesters. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen … when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” 

Trump called for the death penalty against Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and once compared his political opposition to “vermin,” calling them the “real threat” to the nation. On the eve of his second election victory in 2024, he floated the use of the military to handle “the enemy from within,” defined as “sick people, radical left lunatics.”

And then, of course, there was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said to thousands of supporters at a rally outside the White House. “We fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” All of this is just a small sample of the president’s embrace of violence in his language.

Conservatives once understood that societies are complex systems, and that the reason to try to preserve certain norms and traditions was to avoid needless chaos and disruption as we change and progress. We cannot predict the full consequences of what we do, and so we should choose carefully and deliberately as we navigate the world. We should be modest in our ambitions, aware of our own fallibility and mindful of the way things can go wrong.

Of course, inasmuch as this perspective actually shaped American conservatism, it was mostly to defend existing inequalities and hierarchies. Consider William F. Buckley Jr.’s defense of the Jim Crow South or Ronald Reagan’s jeremiads against Medicare. What looked like wisdom was usually just a rhetorical trope used to justify the power that some held over others. Still, there is something to be said for that spirit of humility, especially as it relates to our politics.

So it goes with Trump’s embrace of violent language. If his predecessors in the White House did not speak this way, it was not because they lacked a killer instinct or were never frustrated by criticism and mockery. Rather, they understood the weight and power of the office, and the way that this language, if used, could spiral out of control into actual violence and disorder.

But, in Trump we have a person who isn’t concerned with the impact of his language and the consequences of his words — who delights in wielding them as a weapon against others, with no regard for what it might do or whom it might influence. He thought nothing, for example, of calling a group of Democratic lawmakers “traitors” who were “guilty of seditious behavior at the highest level” and who should be “arrested and put on trial” and even punished with “DEATH!” He thinks nothing of targeting individual critics with vitriolic social media posts and of threatening entire nations with total destruction.

Trump may not care about the power of his words. But those words still matter. They weigh on society. Ten years of violent language, 10 years of fanning the flames of discord and conflict, 10 years of calls to effect change through violence — all of these have had an effect.

It is not that Americans are new to political violence. It is one of the defining aspects of our national experience. But in the decades between the assassinations of the 1960s and the present, there had been a steady decline in incidents of such violence, broadly defined. Trump’s entry into American politics has corresponded with a reversal of that trend — with a growing sense among a number of people in society that the only way to make change is through the use of force.

Trump probably did not cause the attempts on his life. But, it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely. And as the single most visible politician in the country, an atmosphere where political violence is more likely is one in which he may find himself a target, for whatever reason the particular person happens to have.

Trump’s response to this latest failed attempt on his life was to tell his audience of journalists that this was the reason he needed a White House ballroom — a space where he could safely hold court. And there is no doubt that, in addition to his megalomania, the ballroom reflects Trump's selfish desire to make the White House a North American Versailles. But one should also consider the extent to which it reflects something else: a desire to isolate himself from the world.

This is a man who rarely travels beyond the confines of the White House compound or Mar-a-Lago. He rarely meets people where they are. Trump holds the occasional rally, but he does not move through the world the way most presidents have. More so than most who have held the office, he lives inside a bubble.

Some of this is vanity. Some of it is laziness. But some of it, I think, is fear. Trump is afraid of the world. Which in a way might mean he is afraid of the world he has helped to build.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are AGAIN creating a false narrative about how horrible political violence is an American epedemic

With appreciation to the opinion writer Benamin Wallace-Wells, I must say some of the graphics described are difficult to read but important nonetheless.  

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence
After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity.  Opinion published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.  

Full disclosre, I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until after his brutal assassinaation in Utah, in broad daylight, while hewas speaking to a group of students.  His short bio: Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and was its executive director. He published a range of books and hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a talk radio program. Kirk was a prominent voice of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, and was considered to have become an icon of modern American conservatism. Kirk was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, briefly attending Harper College before dropping out after one semester to pursue political activism full-time.

UTAH- Three thousand people attended the conservative Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q&A portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, in videos, there is a single, audible crack, and Kirk’s body jerks and then goes limp. In the audience, heads turn: someone had shot him, apparently from an elevated position about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon, Kirk’s spokesman announced that he had been killed. He was thirty-one, and left behind a wife and two young children. Donald Trump, a close ally, ordered all flags flown at half-staff until Sunday evening.

Kirk’s death was brutal, and tragic. It also had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic. In the immediate aftermath of a killing with obvious political resonance, there is a period of nervous foreboding, as the public waits for news of the perpetrator’s identity and for any hints of what might have motivated the terrible act, and braces for the recriminations to come. But, as often as not, information brings no clarity. 

We have a fairly good sense of the politics that motivated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., and James Fields, who sped his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, killing a young woman.

But attempts to define the political motives of Thomas Crooks (who tried to kill Trump last summer, in Butler, Pennsylvania), or of Cody Balmer (who has been charged with firebombing Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in April), or even of Vance Boelter (the longtime anti-abortion activist who, in June, allegedly killed one Minnesota state lawmaker, along with her husband, and tried to kill another) quickly become ensnared in the problems of their apparent mental illness or a more basic incoherence. Robin Westman, who stands accused of shooting and killing two children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis last month (and whose transgender identity was the focus of many right-wing media reports), had written “Kill Donald Trump” on some weapons, and neo-Nazi slogans (“Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough”) on others, and expressed alignment with the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza. The motives were strange and idiosyncratic enough that they couldn’t easily be blamed on any one partisan side.

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. 

Unfortunately, the threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading. ♦