Existential Threatism

    

    The informed idiots who have preached (and I use that word advisedly) Trump's existential threatism have reaped the hell they have sown. Politicians, labor leaders, Silicon Valley tyrants, preachers, community organizers, you name it. Trump survived this time. One family was destroyed and we're waiting on the results of two others. They, and we, are cautiously hopeful.

    Those same informed idiots motivated some deluded boy to do what they would not or could not do, take matters is his own hands and change the course of America. God forbid that there should be a free and fair election where they might lose. This is what they secretly hoped for in their political wet dreams, Trump gone and their hands ostensibly clean. But their hands aren't clean, are they?

    We've heard, ad infinitum, "Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy." Even, and especially, from the president's own mouth. It is a talking point that seems to need no substantiation. If he says it, who would dare challenge it? Like Nixon, if the president did it, ipso facto, it must be legal. In this case, ipso facto, it must be true. But, as with Nixon, it's not true.

    Merriam-Webster tells us that adding -ism to a noun defines an act, practice or process. Good enough for me. Thus, existential threatism. If you preach existential threatism enough times to enough people, especially in schools where no one is strong enough or knows enough to say otherwise, someone will be foolish enough to act on that threat. That's what we do when we're faced with a threat. That's what fight or flight is all about.

    Now a twenty-year-old kid, two years from his high school graduation, has attempted a major political assassination. Failed, and most of America thanks God for that, but still murdered another man and critically injured two more. He was twenty, for God's sake, yet he had heard enough about the Bad Orange Man to make him want to kill him and damn the collateral damages.

    Murdered for what? Some kid's provoked imagination gone haywire? Who provoked him? Teachers? Hmmm. Church? Maybe, but unlikely unless you subscribe to Pastor Jeremiah Wright's doctrine of "The chickens have come home to roost." Scouting? Sports? Even less likely. Gangs? We know so far that he acted alone. Was he deranged or drugged? No history of that to date.

    Do you suppose he was provoked by the non-stop political vilification of Donald Trump? Yes, I think we're onto something now. Donald Trump's Existential Threatism.

    Shades of Gavrilo Princip and Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and the latter's threat to Serbian independence and Princip's unforeseen consequence of WWI. Damn the chaos. The shooter wanted to make a point in both cases and did his best. 

This time the leader survived. Will we?