Most Americans were glad that Donald Trump dodged a bullet at the fateful rally in Pennsylvania.
But not everyone was pleased that 20-year-old assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was such a bad shot.
Until now, many assumed that only a few bad apples wanted the Republican candidate to take a round to the head.
Not so, says alarming new research from a UK-based academic.
Eric Kaufmann says a shocking third of Democratic voters wished Trump had left his July 13 campaign event in a body bag.
At least a third of the people in this photo wanted Trump to take a bullet in Butler, polling suggests
A staggering 71 percent of hard-line lefties said they supported the attempt on Trump’s life.
Among progressives, the figure is much higher, says the University of Buckingham politics scholar.
A staggering 71 percent of hard-line lefties said they supported the attempt on Trump’s life.
Kaufmann said his results could be explained by ‘woke moral absolutism.’
‘Identity politics has moralized the outlook of the Left, painting conservatives as evil rather than wrong,’ he says.
Eric Kaufmann says lefties have embraced ‘woke moral absolutism’
Kaufmann carried out his snap poll of a few hundred people five days after the attack, in which Crooks killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, and injured two others, including Trump.
In the hours that followed, several high-profile liberals voiced support for the assassin, who was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.
Jacqueline Marsaw, who worked for a Mississippi House Democrat, posted on Facebook that Crooks should take ‘shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time.’
‘Ooops that wasn’t me talking,’ she added.
Kyle Gass, who performs alongside movie star Jack Black in the American comedy-rock duo Tenacious D, said: ‘Don’t miss Trump next time,’ in an offhand comment during a show in Australia.
Steven Woodrow, a Democratic state representative in Colorado, lamented how the failed attack created ‘sympathy for the devil.’
The comments were a bad idea and led to a fierce backlash against all three.
Marsaw was sacked, Woodrow backtracked and apologized, and Gass’s musical career has unraveled.
While those three were savaged on social media, Kaufmann’s research suggests their opinions were widespread in America’s pent-up left-wing politics.
This comes down to a growing ‘partisan asymmetry’ in America, he says.
‘The Left is more prejudiced against the Right than vice versa,’ he adds.
Lefties are more likely to unfriend, refuse to date or otherwise discriminate against conservatives than the other way round, his research shows.
The respondents who backed Trump’s assassination bid also had other hard-line feelings against the GOP.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents as he is taken from the stage
Kyle Gass, Jack Black and bassist John Spike have stopped performing in the wake of Gass’s comment in support of the shooting
For example, many of them also agreed with the statement that ‘white Republicans are racist,’ Kauffman found.
This highlights an attitude among lefties that conservatives are ‘evil rather than wrong,’ he says.
As a result, they use ‘catastrophizing language around ‘white supremacy’, ‘fascism’ and ‘danger’,’ he says.
‘Given our new politics of identitarian sacredness and moral absolutism, we should not be surprised to see a rise in political extremism,’ he warns.
He’s not the only observer to expresses alarm about volatile political rhetoric in the 2024 presidential race.
Speaking from the Oval Office after the shooting in Butler, President Joe Biden said it was time to ‘lower the temperature in our politics.’
‘The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated,’ he added.
‘It’s time to cool it down.’
Biden later reviewed some of his own terse political language, and walked back a statement from a week before the assassination, in which he said it was ‘time to put Trump in a bullseye.’
Thomas Matthew Crooks
FBI Director Christopher Wray this week updated Congress on his agency’s probe into the shooting.
He said it came amid an increasingly tense political atmosphere surrounding the presidential campaign.
‘I have been saying for some time now that we are living in an elevated-threat environment,’ Wray testified.
‘Tragically, the … assassination attempt is another example, particularly heinous.’
The motive for the shooting remains unclear.
Wray said many people have described Crooks as a loner and the list of contacts in his phone was short, and his political leaning is unclear.
A day before Wray’s testimony, Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director of the US Secret Service after bipartisan demands to quit over the failure to prevent the attempted assassination.
Much of the criticism has focused on the failure to secure the roof of an industrial building where the gunman was perched about 150 yards from the stage where Trump was speaking.
