‘Eliminate Him’: a look at the violent rhetoric against Donald Trump

While the attempted assassination of Donald Trump has been roundly condemned by his political opponents, liberal politicians and pundits have – implicitly and explicitly – called for his death before.

Trump narrowly avoided death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, when an assassin's bullet apparently clipped his ear as it whizzed past his head. The shooter – named by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – killed one spectator at the rally and wounded two others before he was shot dead by Secret Service agents.

US President Joe Biden decried the attempt on Trump's life, declaring that "there's no place for this kind of violence in America." Ever since Trump won the 2016 election, however, he has faced a steady stream of threats from members of Biden's party and their allies in the media.

Off with his head

Hollywood celebrities reacted with outrage to Trump's shock defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. 80s pop icon Madonna spoke of wanting to "blow up the White House;" actor and activist Peter Fonda called for the president's youngest son, Barron, to be "put in a cage with pedophiles;" and comedienne Kathy Griffin grabbed headlines when she posed for a photoshoot holding a mockup of Trump's bloodied and severed head.

Addressing the audience at Britain's Glastonbury Festival in 2018, Johnny Depp wondered "when was the last time an actor assassinated a president?," adding "maybe it's time." This reference to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was echoed by Broadway star Carole Cook several months later, when she asked a photographer "where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?"

Take him out

Speaking to MSNBC after Trump formally announced his presidential campaign last year, Representative Dan Goldman declared that his fellow New Yorker cannot be allowed to "see public office again."

"He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated," Goldman proclaimed.