The Week: A Thwarted Assassination Attempt

• Next time, get a better mentalist.

• A gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and assassinate President Donald Trump. This was at least the third major attempt on the president’s life. Thankfully, the shooter was quickly subdued by Secret Service agents. In his manifesto, sent to family members shortly before his attempted attack, he wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” He posted more than a thousand times on the social media site Bluesky, used almost exclusively by progressives. Well after a great many details about the shooter and his worldview had been reported, former President Barack Obama posted on social media: “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.” The latter half of that statement is noble; the first half is a transparent attempt to obscure the fact that the shooter’s hatred of Trump is par for the course among the progressive grassroots. This doesn’t mean that harsh criticism of the president is off-limits. But the Left has a predilection for violence that it is unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront.

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• Next time, get a better mentalist.

• A gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and assassinate President Donald Trump. This was at least the third major attempt on the president’s life. Thankfully, the shooter was quickly subdued by Secret Service agents. In his manifesto, sent to family members shortly before his attempted attack, he wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” He posted more than a thousand times on the social media site Bluesky, used almost exclusively by progressives. Well after a great many details about the shooter and his worldview had been reported, former President Barack Obama posted on social media: “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.” The latter half of that statement is noble; the first half is a transparent attempt to obscure the fact that the shooter’s hatred of Trump is par for the course among the progressive grassroots. This doesn’t mean that harsh criticism of the president is off-limits. But the Left has a predilection for violence that it is unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront.