DONALD TRUMP, THE ALL-CONTROLLING PUPPET

The New York Times Magazine has published Lulu Garcia-Navarro's long interview with Tucker Carlson. As you can imagine, the interview sanewashes Carlson -- his batshit crazy conspiracy theory about the Chabad Lubavitch movement's alleged role in pushing the United States into war with Iran doesn't come up, and Carlson's invocations of demons and Satan aren't mentioned.

Garcia-Navarro gets Carlson to explain some of his conspiracy thinking, but he's careful to make it sound rational and not too anti-Semitic. When asked why he believes President Trump agreed to go to war with Iran, he calculatedly provides a list of pro-war advisers that's a mix of Jews and non-Jews:

My strong impression, and I could be wrong because I don’t work there, is that no one in the [White House] was pushing for this, at least overtly. That all the pressure was coming from outside — constant calls from donors and people with influence over the president. Rupert Murdoch, Miriam Adelson, etc., and then a small constellation of, I guess they’d be called influencers, beginning with Mark Levin, but there were others, Sean Hannity, pushing the president to do this and telling him that you will be a figure out of history, you will save and redeem Israel or something.

I have to admit that this, in isolation, is fairly plausible. Later, Garcia-Navarro tries to pin Carlson down, and he sounds a bit more conspiratorial:

You said he’s a hostage just now. You told the BBC he’s a “slave” to foreign interests. Correct.

I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom? By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States.

Saying that Netanyahu strongly influenced Trump's decision to go to war isn't conspiratorial, of course, but saying that Trump is a "slave" to Netanyahu is.

Carlson goes on to argue that we're stuck in Iran because of Netanyahu:

And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. He says, We’re having a cease-fire and we’re having these talks and they’re going great, and we are going to open the strait. And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel’s got to pull back from southern Lebanon. You can’t use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country that’s not your country....

And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.

Carlson is essentially saying that Trump is blameless in this matter -- he could have gotten us out of the war, but Israel trapped him. Carlson ignores Trump's own strategic ineptitude, and his own desire to keep fighting the glorious war that both Netanyahu and Fox News want him to fight until he achieves the glorious victory they tell him he can achieve.

We think Carlson has broken with Trump, but I think he's being careful not to burn the bridge between himself and Trump.

Carlson describes a conversation he had with Trump about Iran -- and puts an utterly implausible spin on it:

He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is. There’s a kind of Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that’s not really what it was. This is my read. That was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice.

No, it wasn't "a justification from a man who feels he has no choice." It was Trump being the Power of Positive Thinking simpleton he's always been, going back to his real estate days. And, well, you can't blame him -- he's run multiple businesses into the ground and destroyed the United States, but he always seems to emerge without a scratch.

Carlson doesn't talk about demons or Satan, but he manages to inject some "spiritual" mumbo-jumbo into the conversation:

... I never saw, nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like: “You want to make this country great again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran.” Instead there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side, for or against. But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.

Okay, let me get this straight: Trump is so spellbinding that his own aides are afraid to be forthright with him, but Trump somehow isn't spellbinding when talking to Netanyahu, Murdoch, Adelson, Hannity, and Levin. This spellbinder -- this theologically supernatural spellbinder -- apparently loses his theologically supernatural powers when talking to boldface names -- or maybe to bellicose Zionists. I can't quite pin down what Carlson is saying here.

I have an alternate theory.

Perhaps Trump is just an egomaniacal ignoramus desperately searching for legacy projects as the monthly injections in his hands remind him of his own mortality, and the boldface names just played him like a Stradivarius.

But Carlson prefers the narrative in which Trump is too powerful to get honest advice from his subordinates and also too powerless to rebuff Netanyahu and a couple of Fox News talking heads, not to mention the 95-year-old man who founded Fox. Either way, Carlson seems to be describing Trump as more sinned against than sinning, which tells me he could return to the Trump fold in the future.

Finally, I want to note another aspect of Carlson's method here. He uses the word "spellbinding," which invokes the religious realm for the yobs who subscribe to his podcast, but is also a term the Times might have used for a John F. Kennedy speech in 1962. He's trying to speak to more than one audience here, and I'd admire the code-switching skill if I weren't distracted by how willing Garcia-Navarro is to fall for it.

CAN DEMOCRATS REALLY FIGHT THE REDISTRICTING WAR TO A DRAW?

The New Republic's Greg Sargent tells us that Democrats can compete with the GOP on redistricting, if they fight hard:

According to a new analysis by Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, Democrats could redraw anywhere from 10 to 22 additional congressional seats for the party in time for the 2028 elections if they push hard with redistricting in seven blue and swing states.

... even if Democrats flip zero chambers, they can redraw up to 10 additional congressional districts for the party, the analysis finds, by maximizing gerrymanders in New York, Colorado, Oregon, and Maryland, where Democrats control governorships and state legislatures.

But even more strikingly, Democrats could redraw as many as 22 additional congressional districts for the party overall if they flip legislative chambers in other states and redraw aggressively in them, the analysis finds.

The analysis argues, for instance, that "three congressional seats are gettable in Wisconsin, three in Minnesota, and up to six in Pennsylvania" if Democrats establish complete legislative control by flipping both houses of the legislature in Wisconsin and one house each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania -- although the Minnesota state constitution appears to ban an immediate redistricting there.

I think Democrats will do very well in state legislative races this year, primarily because anger at Donald Trump will motivate millions of voters around the country to turn out in order to replace rubber-stamp Republicans in Congress. These voters are likely to vote Democratic downballot as well. All of the state legislative chambers mentioned above could flip.

But Democrats put a lot of political capital at risk when they redistrict, and they might struggle to sustain popular support for redistricting in states where they haven't done it. Notice that Abigail Spanberger won the 2025 Virginia governor's race by 15 points, 57.58% to 42.22%, but last month's redistricting referendum passed by roughly 3 points, 51.69% to 48.31% -- and Spanberger has a job approval rating of 47%, with 46% disapproving, according to a Washington Post poll conducted a month ago. Her support for redistricting is a major reason for this decline in support.

As I've often pointed out, both conservatives and moderates outnumber liberals in America. That's been true for many years, although the gap is narrowing:

Democrats are competitive nationally (and have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections) because their voter base includes a greater percentage of self-styled moderates than the GOP base does. "Moderate" might be a meaningless term these days -- moderates these days are angry about many things that anger liberals -- but there's clearly a larger voting bloc that's loyal to the GOP, the party of conservatism, and that wants the opposition party to suffer whenever possible. Anger about the Republican gerrymandering that's taken place since 2010 doesn't seem to have cost any Republicans their seats, or even lowered their approval ratings. That's because Republicans hate Democrats. Republicans are trained to hate Democrats. The media voices they trust tell them every day that Democrats are evil. Even when non-MAGA Republicans witness offputting acts by the president, they tell themselves, "But Democrats are worse."

Democrats attempting to redistrict as aggressively as Republicans won't have as large a base of voters who hate Republicans. I think they'll succeed in many states by invoking Trump, but in states where they might be required to wait until 2030 -- when Trump will (presumably!) be out of office -- they might regret all the invocations of bipartisanship and working across the aisle that they're so fond of.

They'll also be fighting a party that's much better at rallying its voters than Democrats are.

Abigail Spanberger is a radical, communist, psychopath cosplaying as a normal person.

She is in the process of to dragging the state of Virginia to Marxist Mamdani hell just like California and New York.

She is a deeply destructive person. https://t.co/lavOZbtB4y

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) April 6, 2026

GOP rhetoric of this kind can be effective against Democratic governors and state legislators. Republicans are good at demonizing Democrats. Democrats are good at demonizing ... Trump. They haven't built a sustained case against the Republican Party over the years, and they may struggle to win support for aggressive redistricting as a result.

Democrats might get this done, but I want to make clear that it won't happen automatically in states with full Democratic control, especially if the party's legislative majorities are small. Republicans will work hard to make Democrats pay a price for redistricting, something Democrats have never managed to do to Republican redistricters. Democrats need to be willing to pay that price, and to fight for their maps by discrediting the entire GOP, not just Trump.

DADDY, WHAT WAS DEMOCRACY?

The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais is extraordinarily damaging to American democracy, but while it's the worst blow democracy has suffered in America this month, it's not the only one.

I would have voted for the pro-Democratic gerrymander that passed in Virginia earlier this month, and I would have voted for the one in California before that. I'll support a pro-Democratic gerrymander in New York, if there is one. Our governor favors one:

On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York reiterated her support for drawing new maps.

“I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy,” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.

But gerrymanders are bad -- and then Louisiana v. Callais is worse. I don't know how the idea of American democracy survives all this.

First, the Supreme Court decision, which garottes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Elie Mystal writes:

Congress explicitly intended the VRA to include “disparate impact”—the idea that a law that results in racism is indeed racist whether or not the racists who wrote the law admit to their nefarious plans. Alito’s construction explicitly rejects this concept. Nobody elected Alito or the other Republicans on the court to make this decision for us, but they’ve decided that only Republicans on the Supreme Court know what racism truly is.

The Court's decision, written by Samuel Alito,

means that even if you can show that [a] gerrymander was obviously targeted to dilute the Black vote ... it doesn’t matter unless the white gerrymanderers say something like, “I drew this map because I hate Negroes” or some other similarly vile statement bold enough to get Alito excited. It means that the Voting Rights Act is effectively dead.

Florida was so certain of this outcome that it began gerrymandering its House map even before the decision came down. Louisiana plans to reschedule its May 16 primary in order to redraw its maps.

But the worst is yet to come. The New York Times tells us:

... some Democrats fear 2028 will become a worst-case scenario, with Republican-controlled states across the country redrawing their maps to maximum partisan advantage. An analysis by The New York Times last year found that all told, Democrats would be in danger of losing around a dozen majority-minority districts across the South if the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.

And this can happen because the Supreme Court set up this ruling making racial gerrymanders effectively legal by ruling seven years ago that partisan gerrymanders are effectively legal, at least under federal law:

... [a] state can defend their maps by claiming that they were merely engaging in partisan gerrymandering. This move is thanks to what the Supreme Court wrote in the 2019 Rucho case—that though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it is out of the Court’s realm to fix.

So when, say, Louisiana goes back and eliminates many black opportunity districts in its state, it can claim it is doing so to help Republicans, not whites. That’s an outrageous proposition given the considerable overlap between those two groups in Louisiana.

I don't want to downplay racism in this country, but I sincerely believe that the partisan impact of this is what the Federal Society Six care the most about. They might hate Black people, but what primarily motivates them is the desire to keep America a tax and regulatory paradise for right-wing billionaires, particularly fossil fuel billionaires. (I'm sure the surviving Koch brother feels his life's work is all but done.) If the partisan voting split among Blacks were 50-50, the Court's Republicans would have been much less likely to do what they've done.

In response:

... Democrats are gearing up for a battle. In Colorado and New York, they have begun to explore the process of changing state laws and redrawing their maps before the next House races in two years....

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, also a Democrat, hinted at future action in his state during a news conference on Wednesday. “We have options,” he told reporters after the decision from the court had been handed down.

Elsewhere, Democratic strategists have pointed to Oregon and New Jersey as states that could draw new maps for partisan advantage, though they would have to undertake similar processes as Virginia and California and get permission from voters through referendums.

But what we have to look forward to is a future in which members of minority parties in both red and blue states are utterly disenfranchised. A country where most people never vote in a competitive legislative election isn't a democracy. It's a illiberal state of the kind Viktor Orban built temporarily. We appear to be building one permanently. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively made gerrymandering 100% legal, you can't vote out gerrymanderers at the state level because they can gerrymander the state legislatures (as Republicans have already done in states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin) so the pro-gerrymandering majority party stays in power forever.

And all this comes at a time when American democracy was already in a precarious state. We have free and fair elections for the presidency and for statewide offices, and for most legislative bodies, but voters seem fed up. They don't seem to think voting gets them the results they want (apart from MAGA voters who go to the polls hoping to see libs owned). So democracy seems futile even before the next wave of gerrymanders, and soon most states could have all-Republican or all-Democratic House delegations and permanent supermajority control of legislatures. If we can't stop the gerrymandering arms race, why will anyone bother to vote a generation from now?

Mystal writes:

... if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights. Those new justices could overrule not just Callais, but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions.

I hope it can happen. The howling of Republicans -- and, probably, the mainstream media -- if Democrats attempt this will undoubtedly be audible from space. We'll be told that Democrats campaigned as normies and are now acting like "radical left extremists." But it's our only way out.

IF YOU WANT A CODEWORD FOR "KILL," REPUBLICANS HAVE A COUPLE FOR YOU

Acting Attoney General Todd Blanche knows that this 2025 James Comey Instagram post was not code for "Kill Donald Trump":

In the restaurant and bar trade, "86" means "stop taking orders for this item, because we're out of it." It also means "throw the bum out." Comey, like millions of other Americans, wants Donald Trump removed from office. But Blanche knows that credulous Republican rubes -- including Trump himself -- will believe that Comey threatened the president with death.

Republican attacks on their critics are often projection, and this is no exception, because Republicans actually do have a couple of codewords for "kill" that they use regularly. The words are "treason" and "traitor."

Republicans have begun using these words more and more often because of the deliciously bloodthirsty implication: If you're a traitor, Our God Emperor Trump gets to kill you.

Yesterday, Media Matters posted this:

In the last month, right-wing media figures have labeled a wide range of people and entities they associate with the Democratic Party — from former President Barack Obama to mainstream media figures and critics of the Iran War — as “traitors,” in some cases explicitly demanding they be tried for treason and put to death....

* Fox host Will Cain said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) criticizing Trump’s “bungled mismanagement” of the Iran war “is nothing short of treasonous." Cain opened the segment by telling viewers, “As we’re in a high-stakes moment overseas, some Democrats sound like they’re not on team America.” He also called Murphy a “traitor” for making a sarcastic social media post about the war: “Chris Murphy responding to a post about Iran's shadow fleet running a blockade. He responded with one word: ‘awesome.’ That post triggered immediate backlash, as it should. Critics calling him, as they should, a traitor.” [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 4/21/26]

* Newsmax’s Carl Higbie said Murphy “should be expelled from the Senate and charged with treason.” Higbie claimed that “in this case, like we have a U.S. senator ... rooting for the enemy of the country he's supposed to represent.” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 4/22/26]

* Newsmax guest Zuhdi Jasser called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a traitor and enemy of the state for opposing war in Iran. Jasser: “To see traitors like Ilhan Omar talk about our troops the way she does and Israel's moral force the way she does, these are enemies of the state. They’re part of the Marxist-jihadist global axis, if you will.” [Newsmax, Sunday Agenda, 3/1/26]

The post continues with nine more examples. Those accused of treason include Barack Obama, Tim Walz, and the news media.

Only one of the commentators mentions death as a punishment for traitors, but there's no need to make this explicit: the audience for this content knows that convicted traitors can be executed, and drools at the thought of Democrats being executed.

And sometimes Republicans, particularly the president, don't even bother to leave the death part implicit:

Literally every time a Republican says that a political opponent committed treason or is a traitor, the real message is this: It appears that the government ought to kill this opponent. In fact, the government might have have a moral obligation to kill this opponent. Every regular consumer of right-wing media knows this, and finds these messages delightful and uplifting. Keep this in mind whenever you hear a Republican using these words. It's a call for (state) violence.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: THE NEW YORK TIMES SHOULD FACT-CHECK ITS FOCUS GROUPS

The New York Times has just published the transcript of yet another focus group made up of Trump voters. And while it's nice to see that the participants are unhappy with the president -- the headline is

‘Disappointed,’ ‘Surprised,’ ‘Betrayed’: 12 Trump Voters on What Has Gone Wrong

-- the discussion makes clear that Trump voters "know" a lot of things that just aren't true.

For instance:

Let's unpack some of this.

There was a lot of crime, and he did cut down on a lot of that.

There was, in fact, a significant decline in crime last year:

Data from 40 American cities shows a decrease in crime across 11 out of 13 categories of offenses last year compared to 2024, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found in a new analysis.... Nine of those offenses, ranging from shoplifting to carjacking to aggravated assault, declined by 10% or more.

The homicide rate fell 21% in 35 cities which provided data for the crime....

But crime in America has been declining for decades, despite an uptick at the height of the COVID pandemic:

And 2024 -- the last full year of Joe Biden's presidency -- also saw a large drop in crime:

Data and analysis from the FBI, Council on Criminal Justice, and Major Cities Chiefs Association all show that, overall, crime went down significantly in 2024, with violent crime largely returning to pre-pandemic levels.... homicide rates in Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis declined even beyond pre-pandemic levels to historically low 2014 rates.

Franceska continues:

Not all that crime was coming from immigrants.

I'd really like to know what percentage of crime in America Trump voters believe is committed by immigrants. Do they think immigrants commit the majority of crime in America? I think they might.

Many of us (although few if any Trump voters) know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, as the National Institute of Justice reported in 2024:

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

And the Cato Institute tells us:

All immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. The 2024 native-born American incarceration rate of 1,195 per 100,000 natives is the highest of the three groups analyzed. Legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rate, at 303 per 100,000 legal immigrants in 2024. Illegal immigrants have an incarceration rate of 674 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, higher than legal immigrants but also lower than native-born Americans.

During the Biden presidency, there were approximately 14 million undocumented immigrants in America. The U.S. population is 342 million. So these immigrants make up 4% of the population. They can't possibly be the main source of crime in America.

John says:

And he initiated getting us out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. Two positive things, I guess, if you really look at it on the whole. I mean, that was accounting for a lot of our budget money.

In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion. In 2024-25, U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization were supposed to be $750.9 million. That money, which was withheld by the Trump administration, would have been .01071184% of the federal budget.
That's not "a lot of our budget money."
In 2016, President Barack Obama committed $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund under the Paris Agreement. The U.S. had budget expenditures of $3.982 trillion in fiscal year 2017, so that $3 billion (again, withheld by President Trump) would have been .075339025% of the federal budget.

The Times could refute some of the focus group participants' assertions subtly, via linked footnotes or a sidebar. But the Times assembles far more focus groups of Trump voters than Trump skeptics...

... and I assume the paper wouldn't dream of challenging the assertions of these raw, elemental Real Americans. (Yes, I think the Times considers even Black and Hispanic Trump supporters to be genuine Volk whose wisdom must never be challenged, unlike the opinions of icky liberals.)

I'd extend fact-checking to all Times focus groups, even the rare ones that include Democratic voters. But it will never happen.

WE SHOULD BE MORE FORTHRIGHT ABOUT OPPOSING POLITICAL VIOLENCE -- AND ATTACK TRUMP POLITICALLY EVEN HARDER

On the night of the White House Correspondents shooting, it was obvious what the Republican propaganda line would be:

The good thing about Trump obsessing over the "need" for the ballroom is that it steps on the main right-wing propaganda message, which is that the shooting is our fault because we criticize Trump.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) April 25, 2026 at 10:55 PM

That was before we'd read the shooter's manifesto or seen his Bluesky posts. So now political speech is terrorism, if it's critical of Republicans.

Yes. https://t.co/vHyBPxVGDy

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2026

Headline of a Byron York column in the Washington Examiner: "Gunman’s Manifesto Is Anti-Trump Social Media Come to Life." And a New York Post editorial describes ordinary political speech as incitement to violence:

... sane, democracy-loving Americans are beginning to wonder: What will it take to get lefty pols and media to quit their sick, dangerous accusations about Trump, which are surely fueling the hostility and deadly violence?

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” ranted suspected would-be assassin Cole Allen in his manifesto — with its clear reference to Trump.

Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder? Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power.

Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler. They claim he’s ended democracy in America.

They cheer the “No Kings” rallies, as if Trump actually had royal power.

Notably, Allen attended a No Kings protest in California, according to his social-media accounts.

Dems have also repeatedly linked Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, despite the lack of evidence.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) endlessly promotes the charge that the president raped kids, again with no evidence whatsoever.

They’ve also portrayed ICE agents as Nazi brownshirts under Trump’s command.

What remedy would the Post's editorial board propose? Depriving people on the left, and only people on the left, of First Amendment rights?

Victor Davis Hanson suggests that it's terrorism to call Trump a Nazi:

Do we remember the New Republic cover where Trump was photoshopped as Adolf Hitler?

When called out, The New Republic doubled down, offering no apologies for its sick messaging.

“Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”

And so you encourage fellow leftist comrades like Cole Tomas Allen, Ryan Wesley Routh, and Thomas Matthew Crooks to “fight”—to eliminate your Trump-Hitler, allegedly another mass murderer of six million.

The now media-orphaned Joy Reid repeatedly and ad nauseam invoked Trump-Hitler memes: “Then let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” Rachel Maddow sermonized that she was studying Hitler in order to understand Trump.

Those who tried to kill Trump—and murdered Charlie Kirk—likely assumed they would eventually be canonized for ending the “Nazi” threat.

Hanson, to the best of my knowledge, never had a problem with any of this:

They insist we're inspiring violence because we joke about Trump's death. The Post's Miranda Devine harrumphs:

Wishing for Trump’s assassination is not even a fringe phenomenon, with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel thinking it was funny to perform a fake White House Correspondents’ dinner skit last week, fantasizing about the first lady becoming a widow to an appreciative studio audience.

“So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Boom boom.

I think that's an age joke, not as assassination joke, but maybe that's just me. Hanson is on somewhat firmer ground when he writes:

So, how many ways have our elite leftists dreamed of beating up or murdering Trump?

Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and Robert De Niro all preferred punching him out. The now-infamous Kathy Griffin opted for beheading. So did Marilyn Manson.

The New York actors of Shakespeare in the Park turned Julius Caesar into Trump and staged his mass stabbing.

Mickey Rourke fancied clubbing; Snoop Dogg, shooting.

The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s choice, predictably, was poisoning.

Of course, MAGA has been talking like this since 2016:

In May, the Secret Service investigated Donald Trump’s butler over a Facebook post saying that President Barack Obama “should be shot as an enemy agent.”

Secret Service agents also interviewed a Trump campaign adviser last month, after he said that Hillary Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

... Trump only mildly rebuked Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative and informal campaign adviser, after he said on a radio show last month that Clinton should be shot for treason related to the lethal September 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Baldasaro advises Trump on veterans’ issues and has appeared next to Trump at campaign rallies.

After Baldasaro’s statement circulated nationally, Trump’s spokesman Hope Hicks said only that the Trump campaign was “incredibly grateful for his support, but we don’t agree with his comments.” Trump did not sever ties with Baldasaro, whom he called out by name at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday. “Al has been so great,” Trump said. “Where’s Al? Where’s my vet?”

... Calls for violence against Clinton are not hard to detect at Trump events. At an event in Ashburn, Virginia, last week, a pre-teen boy in the press area shouted “take the bitch down!” with his nearby mother’s approval. On Tuesday, a reporter at a Trump rally in North Carolina tweeted that someone had shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” — a refrain that has been heard at more than one Trump campaign events in recent weeks, along with calls for Clinton’s hanging.

And since then:

Here’s Trump threatening violence, calling for his political enemies’ executions, celebrating the deaths of people he didn’t like, and otherwise casually promoting political violence. There was also the small matter of Jan. 6 and subsequent pardons for violent felons.

[image or embed]

— Sarah Longwell (@sarahlongwell25.bsky.social) April 26, 2026 at 8:30 PM

I think our side should denounce violence more frequently -- denounce it explicitly and proactively -- so it's clear to Republicans and to the mentally shaky figures who engage in political violence that what we want are political and legal remedies for Trumpism and Republican misrule. It might be enjoyable to joke about Trump's death, but we get no political benefit from it, and the jokes are easily weaponized by the right.

At the same time, we should double down on political speech, even harsh political speech. Questions like this are un-American, and we should say so:

BASH: You and your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. Do you think twice about that when something like that happens? RASKIN: What rhetoric do you have in mind? BASH: That he's terrible for this country and so on and so forth

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 26, 2026 at 9:55 AM

If we're saying that some political speech is unacceptably "heated," who gets to draw the line? The government? That's not our system. Our system allows criticism, even harsh criticism, of elected officials. If "harshness" isn't allowed, then tear the First Amendment off the parchment and flush it, because free speech is no longer a fundamental right in America.

HOW TRUMP LIKES HIS NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY SERVED

There was a shooting last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the president did a 180 on the subject of White House correspondents, according to The New York Times:

All week long he had been aiming screeds at the news outlets in the room, but now he was praising the reporters before him, complimenting their outfits, using a polite tone of voice and thanking them for their work.

“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”

This was definitely not the message he had planned to deliver to the media tonight. He said he was going to make what he called the “most inappropriate speech ever made,” and sounded a bit disappointed that he had been robbed of that opportunity. So disappointed, in fact, that he vowed the dinner would be rescheduled for some time in the next 30 days.

But then, he would need a rewrite — or at least that is what he said for now.

“I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said. “I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”

I have no idea whether Trump really would have delivered the "most inappropriate speech ever made" if the shooting hadn't happened. This could be an empty boast, like his threats to obliterate Iran. But I assume he would have delivered a typical Trump speech -- a rambling but very nasty hour-and-a-half diatribe, probably with an emphasis on the supposed sins of "the fake news." It would have been ugly. It might have had a few new insults that would have seemed unusually harsh even by Trump's standards and would have grabbed all the headlines, while going viral on X and Bluesky.

And then the shooting happened, and Trump was the central figure in the only news story anyone cared about. And all of a sudden, he didn't feel the need to launch mean-spirited attacks at the press, because his narcissistic supply needs were being met. He no longer needed to make news. He was news. Attention was coming to him.

Now he gets to say he's in rarefied company:

When asked by a reporter, “Why do you think this keeps happening?” Trump responded, “Well, you know, I've studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people, the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln ... the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after. They don't go after the ones that don't do much.”

“And when you look at the people where there was an attempt or a successful attempt, they're very impactful people. They're big names," he continued.

(Apparently he doesn't know that Gerald Ford, one of our least consequential presidents, survived two assassination attempts in one month.)

And he gets to demand his beloved ballroom, which I'm beginning to believe he sees as himself in the form of a building.

Am I saying that Trump doesn't really hate the media -- that it's all an act? No. He hates the media and he wants to woo the media. He's known for attacking some of the same journalists he's courting -- Maggie Haberman, for instance. He wants them to write nothing but flattering pieces about him, and he hates them when they don't. But instead of accepting the idea that they sometimes won't feed his ego, he continues to seek their praise and resent them when they don't deliver it. His need for praise is bottomless.

But a shooting silences any criticism of Trump, at least temporarily. And so he gets the coverage he wants

“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”

Translation: He's the main character, and no one is being mean to him. And the world turns on Trump's need for ego gratification.