‘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.

While Goldman later apologized for his choice of words, he is not the only Democrat lawmaker to apparently threaten Trump's life. Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments in 2020 when she warned Trump and his "trumpers" to "walk lightly," or else her "soldiers" would "make them pay."

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used similar rhetoric last week when she declared that the upcoming presidential election "is not a normal election," and that Trump "must be stopped. He cannot be president."

Two weeks before the shooting, BBC reporter David Aaronovitch wrote on X that if he were President "Biden, I'd hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America's security." On Sunday morning, Aaronovitch said that he had deleted the tweet, claiming that his words were "clearly satirical."

A threat to democracy

Biden's response to Saturday's shooting was one of unequivocal condemnation. The US president, who will face off against Trump in this November's election, said that he was "praying for" his political opponent, and that "we must unite as one nation to condemn" political violence.

In a post on social media less than a month earlier, however, Biden's team described Trump as "a genuine threat to this nation."

"He's a threat to our freedom. He's a threat to our democracy. He's literally a threat to everything America stands for," they posted on the president's social media accounts.

While Biden has never explicitly wished physical harm on his opponent, at least one would-be assassin has used similar words to justify his plans to kill Trump. 77-year-old Thomas Welnicki was arrested for phoning US Capitol Police in 2020 threatening to "take down" then-President Trump. His lawyer later told prosecutors in New York that Welnicki was distraught at "the threats to our democracy posed by former President Trump."

Stripped of protection

Had Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson got his way, Trump would have had no Secret Service protection at Saturday's rally. Earlier this year, Thompson proposed legislation that would strip this protection from former presidents convicted of felonies, as Trump was in May. The act was explicitly tailored to target Trump, Thompson's office said, explaining that the former president's criminal charges "have created a new exigency that Congress must address."

Immediately following Saturday's shooting, one of Thompson's staffers wrote on Facebook that the shooter should "get some shooting lessons so you don't miss next time." She deleted the post – which Mississippi Republicans called "despicable" – shortly afterwards.