
Sticks and stones
Many children, myself included, often heard the refrain, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. In my case, it was part of my parents’ efforts to calm me in the face of daily schoolyard bullying to which I was subjected in elementary school. I might not have believed it then, but after Saturday’s events, if we didn’t already know better, we do now.
Let’s get right to the heart of the matter. Words can hurt. They can kill. And Saturday they came damned close to killing a former President, the Republican soon-to-be nominee for President, and if current trends hold, the next President of the United States. How close? A fraction of an inch. Less than a couple centimeters.
Ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his run for President in June 2015 there has been a veritable unrelenting tidal wave of hatred, vitriol, and shameless lies to come out of what can only be termed the state media and the Democratic Party against the man who would become the 45th President. They mocked him, accused him of being a racist and a sexist, said he was a hater.
His opponent, Hillary Clinton, bankrolled a bogus so-called dossier to paint him as a tool of Vladimir Putin and someone who would have Russian whores pee on him. High officials in what is supposed to be the country’s premier organ of law enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, furthered the lies, tricked close associates of Trump into entrapment, knowingly verified warrants as truthful that they knew were not. Putin himself would have been proud of the techniques used by FBI officials to attempt to prevent the will of the people from selecting Trump as their President.
For virtually the entire four years of his term he was hounded by one bogus investigation after another. He was impeached, but not convicted, twice. He was badgered, slandered, and mocked relentlessly. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were squandered on trying to pin one false charge after another on the man. The nation’s energy and attention and good will were plundered, all because a single man dared challenge the established order. And that established order fought back, covering up the corruption and perfidy of his opponent in 2020, using a national crisis in the form of a pandemic as an excuse to bend and break election laws, putting a weak, already dementia-ridden tool who would do as he was told, into office.
That was then. This is now.
A lot of people, the current incumbent among them, thought Trump was done, an artifact of the past. But he wasn’t done, and when he indicated he was going to reclaim the office he felt was taken from him, the wheels of the established order swung back into action. Biden’s Department of Justice (sic) swung into action, launching what has been termed a lawfare campaign against him, ginning up legal cases on charges others, Biden himself and Hillary before him, were guilty of, but never charged. Dem Party hacks in Georgia and New York ginned up state cases. But Biden and his henchpeople underestimated voters ability to see through the ploy, and with each charge, each case, each hearing, Trump’s popularity increased.
Biden, in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2021, promised to bring the country together. Something he put the lie to almost every time he has opened his mouth since. He spoke nothing but defamation and hatred for the half of the country who continued to support Donald Trump. He sneered at “Maga Republicans,” said Trump would be the end of democracy. Never mind reconciliation. It was the hyperbole of hatred that came from Biden’s mouth.
“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump presciently told his supporters. By now those supporters see all too clearly the truth in those words.
And then Saturday happened, and the true import of the lies and hatred and vitriol spewed by the current President and the lackeys in the state media — afflicted to the last one with the mental illness known as TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome — became apparent. You don’t compare someone to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, say he’s going to usher in Fascism and Naziism, be the death of democracy, predict he would incarcerate and execute his opponents, and all the other hyperbolic nonsense spewed by the real haters in the White House and state media, and not expect some nut job, like Saturday’s shooter, to take those things to heart and act on them. Take, for instance, the June cover of the leftist magazine The New Republic, presented above. That’s a real cover, not some made-up meme. And the magazine had the chutzpah to double-down on defending it following Saturday’s assassination attempt.

The power of words to hurt
If someone really believes Trump to be Hitler, who wouldn’t want to see him done away with before he can take power? Biden and others can blather about deploring political violence, but if they really believed their words they wouldn’t say things to incite it. We don’t know all of his motivation, but Thomas Andrew Crooks, the 20-year-old shooter on Saturday, might have felt he was doing something heroic in attempting to kill Donald Trump. I’d also add that he gave truth to Trump’s words about who the haters are really coming for, since the shooter was willing to fire into a crowd of Trump supporters, killing one and critically wounding two others. Almost as miraculous as Trump’s survival is that more innocent people were not killed or wounded in the eight-round fuselage released by Crooks from his AR-15.
Just last week, Biden told donors in a private phone conference it was time to forget about his abysmal debate performance and “to put Trump in the bulls-eye.” Well, on Saturday, someone attempted to do just that.
On Monday, in one of his halting, stumbling, and rare interviews, with NBC’s Lester Holt, Biden tried to cover his tracks. And he couldn’t even get that right, mumbling a couple of times that he didn’t say “crosshairs,” as if it made any difference. Apparently he was trying to remember some talking point given him by his handlers, and all it did was further reinforce the notion of what he did say, and his inability to express thoughts cogently.
Despite every thing thrown at Trump, from Biden’s lawfare to a would-be assassin’s bullet, Trump has only grown stronger and more likely to be elected back into the White House in November. As one black woman said Tuesday, speaking to a reporter in an Irish bar in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is under way, “He’s Teflon Don.”
Indeed.
Featured image: Fight! Evan Vucci, AP Photo, used under Fair Use.
The New Republic cover, The New Republic, used under Fair Use.
The Instant of the Shot, NTD.com, used under Fair Use.
This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.













