Donald Trump And The Speckled Band
A locked door mystery
There was a third failed attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Saturday. Although I look forward to the eventual end of Trump’s putrid existence, I would never want him assassinated. I oppose all forms of political violence, but on a more practical level, it would only benefit the MAGA movement if some fool with a gun made Trump a martyr.
No, I am content to wait for natural causes to take Trump away like Calgon. Ideally, it’s after a debilitating stroke that leaves his face misshapen and sagging and reduces his speech to random nonsense phrases. That should fatally damage his strongman image, but Trump is kind of like this already and his more cultish followers haven’t abandoned him. (Watch below.)
Those same sycophants have taken to social media to complain that the amorphous left irrationally hates Trump. Some have pointed out there there were no assassination attempts against Democratic presidents, which would be an interesting observation if it were at all true.
Former President Barack Obama was the target of at least 11 serious assassination attempts. The threats against him were so great he was the first presidential candidate to receive Secret Service protection early. He received 400 percent more death threats than George W. Bush, who had shoes thrown at him.
Some of the worst Obama assassination attempts include a 2008 plot by three men — one of whom literally had the surname “Adolf” — to shoot Obama from a high vantage point during his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech. That same year, two white supremacists in Tennessee were arrested for planning a racist murder spree that would’ve climaxed with killing Obama. The goons claimed they would have dressed in all-white (obviously) tuxedos and worn top hats while driving their vehicle as fast as they could toward Obama and shooting at him from the windows.
A North Carolina man was indicted for threatening to execute Obama with a sniper rifle in the summer of 2008. A neo-Nazi in Maine planned to make a “dirty bomb” to execute Obama before he could take office in 2009, but the neo-Nazi’s abused wife killed him in December 2008. Good for her.
Of course, the threats didn’t end when Obama took office, and we shouldn’t forget that Donald Trump personally pushed a racist conspiracy theory that Obama was an illegitimate president with a fake birth certificate — the very sort of slander that likely fueled even more threats on his life.
When Trump was considering a presidential run as early as 2010, his support was concentrated among the far-right loons who believed Obama was foreign-born, Muslim, or both (he is neither). Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen urged the National Enquirer to openly question Obama’s citizenship and faith. There’s a popular narrative that Trump was just a racist crank who Obama provoked into running for president after making fun of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That’s perverse victim-blaming, as the facts clearly show that Trump had always planned on building his political career off the racist backlash to Obama’s presidency.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that after Obama’s inauguration, further plots and attempts to assassinate the first Black president escalated in tandem with the birther conspiracy.
In November 2011, a gunman fired multiple shots from a semi-automatic rifle at the White House. One round broke a window, but fortunately the Obamas weren’t at the residence. In 2012, five Georgia men, members of the terrorist “FEAR” militia, plotted to assassinate Obama. In 2012, a Mississippi man sent poison-laced letters to Obama and other officials. In 2015, three New York men were charged in another terrorist plot to kill Obama. In 2016, a Korean man posted letters on the White House web site that threatened to kill the U.S. ambassador to South Korea and rape Obama’s youngest daughter, Sasha, who was 14 at the time.
The threats didn’t end once Obama left office, and there’s probably a direct link to his successor posting unhinged social media rants accusing him of treason. In 2023, a January 6 rioter was arrested near Obama’s Washington D.C. home after posting threats online. He’d shown up with weapons and bomb-making materials.
However, MAGA presumably thinks all these incidents were part of a massive hoax orchestrated by the Southern Poverty Law Center. How else do you explain the gaslighting comments from Republicans that insult our intelligence and disrespect our short-term memories.
Actor Patricia Heaton (who was good on The Middle) posted on social media after Trump’s measly third assassination attempt, “I wasn’t happy when Clinton, Obama or Biden won, but I didn’t call them fascist/dangerous/threat to democracy. I didn’t hope someone would assassinate them. I went on with my life with gratitude. Friends on the left, please try this. Your life and our country will be better.”
So, I don’t know what Heaton specifically said about past Democratic presidents, but we do know that Republicans in general weren’t so sanguine. There’s video footage and everything. Even now, Republicans struggle to state on the record that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Former Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn called Biden an “inept geriatric despot” on the House floor. During the 2016 Republican primary, Marco Rubio often insisted that Obama was deliberately trying to harm America.
Heaton’s argument is also classic false equivalency. It’s like a German complaining in 1955 that they never called FDR a “threat to democracy” or a “tyrant” but Americans were deeply critical of the German leader of the same period. That’s not a fair comparison, though, as Germans are far more capable of self-reflection and genuine remorse than MAGA.
Whatever your personal feelings are about old men, Black people, and adulterous blow job receivers, Biden, Obama, and Clinton were not fascists, dangerous, or active threats to democracy. They never tried to overthrow the government, as Trump did.
Trump doesn’t just govern in opposition to the wishes of half the nation. He has actively waged war against “liberal America.” He has never even pretended he’s the president for the entire United States. He’s the ruler of an overwhelmingly white sub-nation that seeks to subdue the country’s racially diverse urban centers. He’s attacked Democratic-run states and cities with both economic and violent force. He’s withheld necessary federal disaster aid from Democratic-run states. He’s sent his armed goons into Democratic cities, which led to the un-prosecuted murders of two U.S. citizens. In contrast, Barack Obama expanded health care access for millions of Americans, and Joe Biden was very old.
There is no justification for political violence, but there’s also no rational provocation to violence just because a Black man and an Elderly American were elected president. Trump however steeps in violence and division like harsh and bitter tea. He’s like the villain in the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Speckled Band. The sinister Dr. Grimesby Roylott wants to get his two stepdaughters out of the way so he can have their mother’s inheritance all to himself. He successfully murders one by luring a venomous swamp adder — the titular “speckle band” — into her bed while she sleeps. Fortunately, Holmes foils the attempt on the second stepdaughter: He strikes at the bell cord the adder uses to enter her bed, and the angered snake returns to Roylott’s room and kills him. (Good for the snake.)
Finding Roylott’s dead body with the adder curled around his forehead, Holmes says, “Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.” (Below is a clip from the Jeremy Brett TV adaptation.)
Perhaps Trump is destined to meet a violent end. If he does, it’s certainly not because any Democrat or journalist correctly identified his many offenses against common decency. He’s boasted that “the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after.” These assassination attempts only feed his insatiable ego, and it’s why I prefer a disgraced, humiliated Trump to a martyred one. He must survive to see a world where we’re finally free of him.
JFK, a Democratic president, was assassinated. It happened in my lifetime, although I don't remember it, as I was only 2 at the time. Mama was horrified - she remembered FDR's death, but he died of natural causes. She wasn't eligible to vote until 1960, because 21 was the earliest voting age then, and JFK got her first vote. She was 24 and pregnant with me. Does this make JFK my first vote? I still say Jimmy Carter got my first vote in 1980, because I was registered to vote and actually cast the vote. By then, of course, the voting age had been lowered to 18.
As for trump deciding to run for president because of Obama's roast in 2011, OK, fine, it decided him to do it. But notice that he didn't run against Obama in 2012. trump was, is, and always has been a coward.
I'm glad people like Stephen are documenting these hypocrisies and inconsistencies for posterity's sake, because it really doesn't matter in the now times. If it did, Trump would have washed out in 2015 and MAGA a footnote.