
In
Biden's tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.
"The idea that I'd be intimidated by
Had former Vice President
Recently, Sen.
"Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen."
One trait of the Democratic field of presidential candidates is always to sound further to the left than any of their primary rivals. Apparently, a similar habit is to see who can most effectively imagine beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.
The current candidates are just channeling three years of sick showboating by
Actor
This is especially dangerous in the aftermath of progressive zealot and
Rep.
Yet the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president is lowering the bar of assassination, and it will haunt the country long after Trump is gone.
On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the
A few months later, comedian
Since then,
Celebrities such as
It is hard to determine whether their tweets and outbursts are designed to restore sagging careers, are heartfelt expressions of pure hatred, or both.
We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the re-election campaign and second presidential term of
A few columnists, documentary filmmakers and novelists went well beyond the boilerplate invective of calling Bush a fascist, racist, Nazi and war criminal, and imagined his assassination in a variety of ways.
But we are now well beyond even that rhetorical violence.
Trump and his critics often go at it relentlessly in interviews, in Twitter wars, and on television and radio. No insult seems too petty for Trump to ignore.
Yet progressives like Biden and Booker seem to think that by bragging of wanting to do violence to the president, they will rev up their base and win attention, as if physical violence is justified by Trump's unorthodox presidency.
Nonetheless, the current climate is becoming scary. Those who brag of wanting to violently attack the president should worry about where their boasts will finally lead if any of the thousands of James Hodgkinsons in America take such threats seriously and act upon them.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal, where this first appeared, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.