Democrat Macho Men

There was a time, it seems so long ago now, when folks on the left flattered themselves to think that they were kind, gentle and non-violent and that it was those "right-wingers" who were mean-spirited and violent.

But history has a way of reversing such things and turning them all topsy-turvey. The violence and mean-spiritedness now, especially of the rhetorical sort, but also actual physical violence, emanates far more often from the left than from the right. Just ask Rep. Steve Scalise or almost anyone who has the chutzpah to wear a MAGA hat in most urban, and many suburban, precincts.

Take, for example, just one form of this violence, the expressions of desire among prominent people in our politics and culture to do physical harm to President Trump. It really is an unprecedented phenomenon, and it's as frightening as it is repugnant.

Victor Davis Hanson mentions a number of instances of this in a recent article at National Review. He writes that the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president will haunt the country long after Trump is gone, and claims, rightly, I think, that such rhetoric is not only ugly in itself, but diminishes the psychological inhibitions that would ordinarily prevent deranged souls from acting on such fantasies.

For example, former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he'd like to punch Mr. Trump. As Hanson describes it:

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’”

More recently the aging Mr. Biden boasted that,

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? . . . He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

What a man! If we were electing Mr. Testosterone instead of Mr. President who could not vote for Joe Biden?

Hanson asks us to imagine the media response had Dick Cheney ever said such a thing about Barack Obama. Yet Biden says it about Trump, and all we hear are the sounds of silence.

Speaking of testosterone, Senator Corey Booker (D., N.J.), another presidential candidate, felt it necessary to let us know that he's every bit as macho as Mr. Biden:

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.

Booker should hope, should he live long enough to reach his seventies, that he has even half the stamina Mr. Trump apparently has.

These odious asseverations of one's machismo - from representatives of a party, no less, many members of which bewail "toxic masculinity" - are actually just a political version of what we've been hearing from our Hollywood celebrities.

Hanson mentions another septuagenarian on Ageless Male, actor Robert De Niro, who has repeatedly expressed a desire to physically assault Trump. A month before Trump was elected, De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Since then, and presumably because De Niro has been thwarted in carrying out his fantasies only by the diligence of the Secret Service, he has settled for a series of “F*** Trump” outbursts.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), just hours after she was sworn in, claimed at a rally that she had promised her young son that “we’re going to impeach the motherf***er.” I hope the rally wasn't for mothers seeking tips on how to be good role models for their children. Her willingness to employ such vulgar language with her son tells us much more about the sort of person Ms. Tlaib is than the sort of person Mr. Trump is.

Hanson goes on to write:

On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the White House that she had thought of blowing it up.

A few months later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.

Since then, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have been in constant competition to imagine the most gruesome way of killing off Trump: stabbing, blowing up, burning, shooting, suffocating, decapitating, or beating.

Celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore seem to relish the media attention as they discuss or demonstrate what they seem to think are creative ways to kill the president.

This didn't start with Trump's election, though, as Hanson reminds us:

We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the reelection campaign and second presidential term of George W. Bush.

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.

Whenever attempts have been made on the life of a politician over the last twenty years or so, Democrats have been quick to blame (absurdly) rhetoric coming from conservative talk radio and other venues for creating a climate of hate, fear and division. Yet no prominent conservative figure ever spoke about any Democrat, much less a president, with the rhetorical violence many Democrats are employing against President Trump. Where are the liberal newspaper editorials condemning the hate speech that's practically gushing from the left nowadays? As Hanson says,

[T]he 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 on them.

Donald Trump is a controversial president, no doubt. He replies to his critics with strong, often inflammatory invective. 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.

The juvenile chest thumping of such as Messers. Biden, Booker and De Niro is certainly deplorable and disgusting but most of all it's dangerously irresponsible.