Weaponizing tragedy for political capital: How Trump assassination attempts fuel MAGA

Donald Trump made a hero’s return to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July 13 attempt on his life. “Less than 24 hours later,” ABC News continues, “Trump laid blame for the political violence on Democrats, telling Fox News Digital the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was ‘causing me to be shot at,’ while also asserting they are "destroying the country — both from the inside and out." "Exactly 12 weeks ago this evening on this very ground,” Trump noted, “a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and to silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country," He continued: “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows, maybe even tried to kill me.” This effort to attribute the motive for the attempted assassination of a president or presidential candidate of the opposing party is as dangerous as it is unprecedented in American history. The FBI so far has been unable to identify any motive in the first attempt on Trump’s life, calling Trump a “target of opportunity.” Thomas Crooks, who was responsible for that attempt, had, the FBI says, “no definitive ideology…either left-leaning or right-leaning,” Ryan Routh, the man who last month planned to kill Trump on his Florida golf course, seems to have been moved by an array of policy grievances against the former president, but none of them had anything to do with the Democratic Party or what Democrats have said about Trump. For example, the first attempt on a president’s life occurred on Jan. 30, 1835 when someone the Post called “a troubled, unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence armed himself that day with two pistols and hid behind a pillar in the U.S. Capitol to ambush President Andrew Jackson.” The next assassination attempt happened thirty years later in 1865 when John Wilkes Booth, a devotee of the defeated Confederacy, shot and killed Abraham Lincoln.