The Left Spent Years Running An 'Assassination Prep' Campaign (2025)

It was the shot heard round the world. A sound no one wanted to hear but one that was the culmination of the moral rot that has infested our political left and corporate left-wing media. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump was an act of depraved wickedness — but not everyone sees it that way because corporate media spent months desensitizing Americans to the possibility of such an egregious attempt.

For years the left has smeared Trump and his supporters as “threats to democracy.” Pundits portrayed Trump as a man akin to Adolf Hitler. But these deliberate and malicious misrepresentations of Trump were part of the left’s plan to prep the public for an assassination attempt against Trump. As Federalist Co-Founder and CEO Sean Davis explained back in December, this type of rhetoric is “assassination prep by the corrupt regime.”

“It is an obvious information operation meant to justify and even incite the most extreme measures, up to and including unconscionable violence. They will stop at nothing to retain power.”

Last November, The Washington Post’s Opinion Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan called a “Trump dictatorship … increasingly inevitable.”

“Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president,” Kagan wrote. “When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor.” Kagan went on to compare Trump and his supporters to Hitlerites in Nazi Germany before once again posing the ominous question: “Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can.” Kagan concluded that the “odds are … pretty good” that Trump would become a dictator.

“The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local Gauleiters needed instruction.”

The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway said in December that “this extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler (because, they say, he might do what Democrats are doing right now) — should probably be given the name ‘Assassination Prep.’”

An article in Politico written last December by Holly Otterbein, Elena Schneider, and Jonathan Lemire gave cover to Biden and his team for comparing Trump to Hitler, arguing “historians” also agree that Trump is akin to a dictator like Hitler.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein said Trump’s second term “could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.”

The Hill’s opinion contributor Jacob Ware tried to lessen the blow in a January piece warning that “assassination attempts are on the rise worldwide — is the US next?”

Ware explained that the United States “has avoided a successful high-profile assassination during the recent escalation in domestic political violence, but not for the lack of trying,” citing attempts on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Ware, however, then went on to blame Trump.

“In the United States, to be sure, norms of civility have frayed, driven in no small part by a former president who seems to delight in threatening violence against his political opponents,” Ware wrote, tying in a post from Trump in which he insinuated Mitch McConnell’s siding with Democrats would be political suicide and comments he made calling out former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley’s alleged collusion with China. Without a hint of irony, Ware went on to say that Trump’s language “dehumanizes political rivals, and may in turn demystify the act of killing them.”

The notion Ware posited, however, isn’t wrong — it’s just misdirected. Rhetoric comparing Trump to a murderous dictator or the greatest threat to our nation is meant to dehumanize him and, in turn, “demystify the act of killing” him.

It’s why the media is downplaying the assassination attempt as a mere “incident” or “shooting.”

Take, for example, The Denver Post, which had a photo of Trump triumphantly fist-pumping to the crowd with a bloodied face while being rushed to safety with the caption “GUNMAN DIES IN ATTACK.” A small subhead reads, “Trump says he was shot in ear.”

This wasn’t an mere “attack,” nor a matter of hearsay.

Trump was the victim of an attempted assassination. It was a deliberate attempt to take his life.

But how easy is it to dismiss real political violence when the left-wing media apparatus spent years cushioning the blow?

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2