Enough is enough!

For the second time in 64 days, some angry nut with a gun tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

How Does This Keep Happening?

Americans really need to stop trying to murder Donald Trump.

You’ll pardon me for going way out on a limb there, but apparently that needs to be said, loudly, clearly, repeatedly, perhaps spelled out in giant flashing red neon signs.

The FBI’s statement yesterday was terse and direct: “The FBI has responded to West Palm Beach, Florida, and is investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.”

Again.

Rafael Barros, the U.S. Secret Service special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office:

I first want to thank all of our law enforcement partners, including the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, for their involvement today. Former President Donald Trump is safe and unharmed following a possible attempted assassination shortly before 2 p.m. Sunday at Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach. U.S. Secret Service personnel opened fire on a gunman located near the property line. The FBI has assumed its role as the lead agency investigating this matter.

On Truth Social, the former president expressed gratitude and effusive praise for his Secret Service detail and local law enforcement:

Most importantly, I want to thank the U.S. Secret Service, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw and his Office of brave and dedicated Patriots, and, all of Law Enforcement, for the incredible job done today at Trump International in keeping me, as the 45th President of the United States, and the Republican Nominee in the upcoming Presidential Election, SAFE. THE JOB DONE WAS ABSOLUTELY OUTSTANDING. I AM VERY PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!

The suspected gunman accused of attempting to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf club on Sunday afternoon has a long history of run-ins with police, including barricading himself inside his own North Carolina business with a machine gun, and appears to have also traveled to Ukraine in 2022 to support the war effort.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was detained by Secret Service in the vicinity of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club on Sunday after an agent spotted a rifle barrel sticking out of the bushes and opened fire on the would-be assassin.

Routh, who was identified to the Associated Press by law-enforcement sources, seems to have reinvented himself as a Ukrainian resistance fighter and booster after a career in construction and a long history of traffic offenses and petty crimes. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Routh began posting on social media about his willingness to fight and die for the country.

Routh popped up in a March 2023 New York Times article, about foreign volunteers who had gone to Ukraine — and the shaky records, performance, and sanity of those volunteers. Justin Scheck and Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported, “Many of these homespun groups of volunteers are fighting with themselves and undermining the war effort. Some have wasted money or stolen valor. Others have cloaked themselves in charity while also trying to profit off the war”:

With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest.

“We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.

It is not clear whether he has succeeded, but one former Afghan soldier said he had been contacted and was interested in fighting if it meant leaving Iran, where he was living illegally.

Yesterday’s would-be shooter is likely a nutjob, but then again, just about all would-be assassins are nutjobs compared to the average American.

The evidence we have regarding the shooter in Butler, Pa., is that he just wanted to kill a president or former president and didn’t particularly care which one. Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office, said in a media call in late August, “In the 30 days prior to the attack, the subject conducted more than 60 searches related to President Biden and former President Trump. Of particular note, our investigation identified specific searches conducted on July 5 to include ‘when is the DNC convention’ and ‘when is the RNC in 2024.’”

The Butler shooter was just another troubled, angry young man who thought murdering a former president would lead to the kind of notoriety and sense of achievement that had eluded him in the rest of his life.

But that doesn’t quite get everyone off the hook for the incendiary rhetoric that has now become standard issue in every presidential cycle.

Donald Trump is, in the eyes of many Democrats, the devil, the root of all evil, and the end of democracy. Some genuinely believe that if Trump is elected, 2024 will be the last free and fair presidential election for many years, and that Trump will “deploy the U.S. military to seize voting machines and rerun elections in swing states.” (That last prediction is from a December 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Liz Cheney, citing the feverish fantasies of retired general Michael Flynn.)

In last week’s debate, Kamala Harris declared, “Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Really? The worst? Pearl Harbor and 9/11 don’t make the cut? Nothing by al-Qaeda or ISIS or even Timothy McVeigh belongs in that ballpark? Don’t get me wrong, what happened on January 6 was appalling and an outrage, and the buck stops with the president. But this is building up Trump into our national Voldemort.

Vice President Harris also warned, during the debate: “The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct if he were to enter the White House again.”

That is not accurate, of course. The Supreme Court ruled, “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” Those words “within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” are pretty darn important there. If it isn’t constitutional, the president can’t do it.

Harris continued, “Understand, this is someone who has openly said he would terminate, I’m quoting, terminate the constitution of the United States. That he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies.”

Is it really so unthinkable that the aspiring assassin in Palm Beach believed that Trump represented such a threat to the country and democracy that the best solution was a high-velocity bullet? How many mentally unstable people out there see themselves as the protagonist of The Dead Zone, foreseeing national or global disaster in a presidential candidate, and believing the only way to save the world is to commit an act of premeditated murder?

Is it too much to ask that those who are critics of Trump denounce him as “just” a bad choice for president, and not as the man who will destroy the country or world if elected?

As all eyes turn to the U.S. Secret Service once again, it is worth recalling that back in April, Mississippi Democratic representative Bennie Thompson — former chairman of the House January 6 committee — introduced legislation “automatically terminating Secret Service protection for those who have been sentenced to prison following conviction for a federal or state felony.” (The text of the bill stated, “Conviction for a federal or state offense that is punishable for a term of imprisonment of at least one year.”)

Thompson insisted his legislation addressed a serious need: “It is necessary for us to be prepared and update the law so the American people can be assured that protective status does not translate into special treatment — and that those who are sentenced to prison will indeed serve the time required of them.”

After the Butler shooting, Thompson insisted, “My bill would not have affected the Secret Service’s presence during this tragic event. It aims to clarify lines of authority when a protectee is sentenced to prison and is in the custody of another law enforcement agency. . . . That does not apply to the former president.”

Even more awkwardly for Thompson, one of his staffers appeared to have wanted the shooter to succeed:

Thompson, the Democratic U.S. Representative of Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district, has confirmed that Jacqueline Marsaw, a case manager and field director for the congressman, has been terminated from her position after taking to Facebook to share questionable rhetoric in the aftermath of the former president being shot at a Butler, Pa. rally.

On Saturday, the Mississippi GOP called for Marsaw’s firing, highlighting a now-deleted post from her Facebook that read, “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking.” Marsaw had also posted other controversial messages on the social media platform that have since been taken down.

Back in April, Trump’s conviction was hypothetical. At minimum, Thompson exhibited a gleeful eagerness to strip Trump of his Secret Service protection.

(If Trump ever gets sentenced to prison, you know he’s going to a “Club Fed”-style facility. No one’s going to be shivving a former president in the laundry room.)

Once again, we’ve gotten lucky in a matter that shouldn’t be left to chance.

If an assassination attempt against Trump were to succeed, on top of the personal tragedy, it would plunge the nation into a political crisis. The JFK assassination still drives a profound distrust of our institutions 60 years later (even though it is clear that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone), and faith in our institutions isn’t high right now to begin with.

Although the Secret Service seems to have performed more ably in this instance than in the Butler attempt (a very low bar), the root of the problem is the same — a failure to secure enough of the perimeter in Trump’s vicinity to make any serious attempt on his life impossible. At a press conference on Sunday, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Palm Beach County explained, “At this level that he is at right now, he’s not the sitting president — if he was, we would have had this entire golf course surrounded.”

Whatever other problems the Secret Service has, this one can easily be addressed with more resources and by treating Trump — twice a target, now — as if he is the incumbent president for security purposes. We will learn more about this latest incident in coming days, and we should also learn about Routh’s motive, since he is in custody. But the imperative should be obvious — to ensure we never get used to attempts to murder a major-party presidential candidate.