A man opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night trying to kill President Trump — the FOURTH assassination attempt on the man’s life — and the legacy media is already running its favorite play. “How could this happen?” they ask, clutching their pearls with the same hands they used to build the rhetorical pipeline that produced this lunatic.
Gee, we wonder.
Let’s walk through the timeline, shall we? Because these people left a trail of breadcrumbs so obvious that even Wolf Blitzer could follow it. (More on Wolf in a minute.)
It started with Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody, severed replica of Donald Trump’s head back in 2016. Remember that? Hollywood thought it was edgy. The media covered it for about forty-five minutes, issued some tepid “we don’t condone this” statements, and moved on. Nobody got banned. Nobody got investigated. Griffin got a Netflix special.
Then came the “Trump is literally Hitler” era. CNN ran chyrons comparing the President to authoritarian dictators. MSNBC hosts — with straight faces — told their audiences that Trump was an existential threat to democracy itself. Not “a politician we disagree with.” An existential threat. The kind of language you use when you want people to believe that stopping this person is a moral imperative by any means necessary.
And boy, did they escalate. The New York Times and Condé Nast gave a platform to Hasan Piker — a guy who has openly talked about murdering capitalists on his stream. Not in a “metaphorical” way. In a “these people deserve to die” way. And the so-called paper of record said, “Yeah, let’s give this guy a bigger microphone.”
Brilliant editorial judgment, folks. Really top-notch.
Here’s the part that should make your jaw hit the floor. A Rutgers University study found that more than HALF of left-of-center respondents said it would be “at least somewhat justified” to murder Donald Trump. Read that again. Half. Not some fringe Reddit thread. Half of mainstream Democrat-leaning voters told actual researchers, with their names attached, that political assassination is on the table.
And the media — the same media that spent years pumping “Trump is Hitler” into the national bloodstream — reported on that study like it was a weather forecast. “Interesting data point. Moving on to our panel discussion about whether Trump’s tie was too long at the G7.”
You don’t get to pour gasoline on the floor for ten years and then act confused when someone lights a match.
Ben Domenech at the Daily Wire nailed it in his piece this morning: the legacy media has declared who they want dead. They just want someone else to pull the trigger so they can cover it with “Breaking News” graphics and sad piano music.
And when previous attempts happened — Butler, West Palm Beach — what did these geniuses do? Steve Schmidt went on television and blamed Trump. The guy who got shot at. “He brought this on himself with his rhetoric.” That’s like blaming the bank teller for the robbery because she had the audacity to stand behind the counter.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have been blocking additional security funding for the President. The man has survived FOUR assassination attempts and they won’t approve the money to keep him alive. But sure, tell us more about how “democracy is under threat.” We’re all ears.
The corporate press created a permission structure for political violence. They told millions of Americans that the President is a fascist dictator who will end democracy. They platformed people who openly fantasize about killing conservatives. They covered assassination attempts with the enthusiasm of a weather delay at a baseball game. And now a man named Cole Allen walked into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with a gun.
We’re not “shocked.” We saw this coming. We’ve BEEN saying this was coming. The only people who are “shocked” are the ones who wrote the script and can’t believe someone actually followed it.
They built the bomb. They lit the fuse. And now they want a Pulitzer for covering the explosion.