The morning after Donald Trump was nearly murdered by an assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania, the top political adviser to Democratic Party mega-donor Reid Hoffman — who had himself recently joked about Trump becoming a “martyr” — sent an email to journalists wondering why, “NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE.”
Dmitri Mehlhorn implored reporters to consider the “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — … that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.”
Perhaps Mehlhorn felt comfortable posing conspiratorial questions to reporters because they have been quite receptive in the past. Mehlhorn, for example, padded his plea to journalists with conspiratorial mainstays of the contemporary left — theorizing that the assassination staging was a “classic Russian tactic” and urging them to consider “how often Putin and his allies run this play.”
The Russian collusion conspiracy theory — hatched by Democrats — is the most successful and consequential in American history, conceived by a major political party and spread by establishment media. Earlier this year Nancy Pelosi was still on MSNBC claiming that Putin probably “had” something “financial” on Trump.
But the left’s unhinged paranoia about Trump has been widespread and normalized. In an implicit admission of the environment the hyper-hyperbole had created. CNN reports that executives were nervous about what would be said on the show.
They should be. Joe Scarborough — an alleged moderate who takes the temperature of the D.C. consensus each morning — has claimed that Trump was taking orders from Putin, that Trump deployed border agents as SS guards, and warned that the former president would kill reporters and “execute whoever he’s allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country” if he won the election.
Then again, for modern Democrats, every political loss, every inconvenient event, threatens democracy itself. There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past few years that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.