Forty years ago, after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, I remember watching ABC anchor Frank Reynolds violently slam his fist on the desk when he was given some conflicting information about the president’s fate. The ABC brass quickly marched Sam Donaldson out to co-host, hoping to keep Reynolds calm. The country was shocked and somber. While the left disliked Reagan, no one that I remember expressed a hint of joy that he had been shot or sadness that he’d survived.

Fast forward 43 years, and we have another maverick Republican president (albeit not in office at the time) who was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet. This time, while most of the country was shocked and appalled, there was a significant element of the press and the left who argued that the president was responsible for the shooting, as others openly wished the shooter hadn’t missed.

Image by Vince Coyner, using AI.

What’s interesting is that, as every day goes by, we’ve found out more about the utterly absurd events that put Trump at risk. We discovered that the DEI clown running the Secret Service diverted Trump’s usual detail to protect her patron, Jill Biden, leaving Trump with the practice squad. Worse, we learned that the building upon which the would-be assassin set himself didn’t have a sniper on it because the roof was sloped—so a Secret Service sniper might fall off—and that authorities knew the killer was there for more than 20 minutes before the first shot rang out. Agents were even in the building itself! The most charitable assessment is that those in charge are utterly incompetent imbeciles. A less charitable assessment would conclude that they were somehow complicit in the attack.

But, of course, if this were a set-up, it’s just the latest attempt to destroy Trump. The Democrats conspired to sabotage him beginning before he was president and never gave up. There have been lies about Russia, kids in cages, “Good people on both sides,” suckers and losers, and (a Biden favorite) Trump encouraging the drinking or injecting bleach. He was impeached for talking with Ukraine, investigated for allegedly trying to coerce Georgia’s Secretary of State to create votes after the 2020 election, and impeached for inciting that January 6th “Insurrection,” even though no such insurrection occurred, that he urged people to be peaceful, and that Twitter shut down his efforts to calm the crowd. The countless manufactured court cases have just been more of the same.

All this while Democrats and their mouthpieces in the Propaganda Ministry have been telling Americans that Trump is a threat to the nation, calling him Hitler, and suggesting that if he gets into office, he’ll never leave.

Donald Trump has been on the defensive for the last eight years. What’s more, his supporters have been abused, harassed, thrown in jail and, as happened to Ashli Babbitt on January 6th and Corey Comperatore on Saturday, killed.

All this presents a picture of America that is much different than the one that the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the swamp and the media want you to think exists. According to them, it’s Republicans who are the party of violence and destruction. On Tuesday night, Joe Biden inadvertently highlighted this perception. He told the NAACP, “And when you peacefully protested George Floyd’s murder, Donald Trump called for the National Guard to go after you.”

That’s pure gaslighting. Contra Biden’s assertion, I don’t remember the Floyd riots being particularly peaceful. There were riots across the country, more than a dozen people died, numberless businesses were destroyed at a cost of billions, and that entire summer was full of violence. Showing excessive restraint, Trump never called out the National Guard, leaving it to mayors and governors to control these communities.

Nor is this gaslighting limited to 2020. I don’t remember particularly peaceful protests after the death of Michael Brown or Freddie Gray. Thinking back even further, I don’t remember Seattle’s WTO protests in 1999 being peaceful, nor the World Bank protests in Washington the next year. And the Democratic National Convention in 1968 wasn’t marked by peaceful protest either. And more recently, we’ve seen the Hamas-supporting thug wing of the Democrat party unleash violence and chaos across the country.

During that Floyd-inspired “Summer of Love,” Democrats were calling for and supporting violence against the fiction of “systemic racism.” And now, even as they claim never to have encouraged violence, they’ve been telling their sheeple for years that Trump is the new Hitler, a threat to freedom, and a threat to “our democracy.” They and their cronies have suggested that if he gets back into office he’ll likely never leave.

One wonders, given the left’s extraordinary propensity for violence, what might have happened if, rather than Trump being shot, it was the sainted Barack Obama in the crosshairs when he was a candidate? And what if the attempt had been successful? I can only imagine that the resulting cataclysm would have made the “Summer of Love” look like a Boy Scout campfire.

But it wasn’t Barack Obama, and there weren’t any riots. As a matter of fact, there weren’t any protest marches, there weren’t any threats of violence, there was… nothing. And that’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats. One seeks to govern and advance its agenda through debate, legislation, and the ballot box, while the other seeks to use slander, intimidation, and violence to achieve its means.

The last time Republicans were given a proverbial punch in the face—the stolen 2020 election—what did they do? They protested in Washington, and almost all of them were doing so peacefully, as Trump had implored them to. Unfortunately, Democrats conspired to leave the Capitol largely unguarded and then decried the GOP when the predictable chaos ensued after police and agents incited a riot by firing stun grenades and rubber bullets into the peaceful crowd.

This, of course, was labeled an “insurrection,” but it was nothing of the sort. Whatever it was, it was not equivalent to the Democrats’ 2020 Summer of Love, with burning cities, widespread violence, and murders of innocent people. That’s simply not the Republican way.

The bottom line is that Democrats think we live in a democracy, while Republicans—for the most part—understand we live in a republic. The former is the hallmark of tyranny of men, while the latter defines a nation based on freedom and rights guaranteed by a constitution.

So that is where we stand today. We’re not at a hot war, but then we’re not far from it. The Democrats and their comrades in the media, along with their Antifa, BLM, and pro-Hamas stormtroopers, have made it clear that a GOP victory in November will essentially put America where Germany was in the early 1930s. That logic, taken to its logical conclusion, effectively asks the famous question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you? Many of us might say yes.

Well, Democrats are telling us that we’re facing the same threat now in the form of Donald Trump. Given the level of gullibility and mental illness that characterizes the left, how many of them will not choose to become martyrs for the cause or, at a minimum, foot soldiers?

Let’s hope this attempted assassination has a silver lining, which would be that the rhetoric on the left is dialed down a few notches, and a few Democrats start listening to sources outside their silo. If Amber Rose can do it, maybe a few million others could too, and there just might be hope that Trump’s coming victory won’t trigger a leftist cataclysm.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.

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