The mandated, but fully embraced, preface is that attempts at violence, like Cole Tomas Allen’s last Saturday night, have no place in our democracy and are antithetical to liberalism and traditional American values.  But what is not only American but pervasively and uniquely so is gun violence and access to firearms under Antonin Scalia’s interpretation that the first half of the single sentence that comprises the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” has nothing to do with the second half of that single sentence: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”[1] Scalia’s opinion is a dishonest and ludicrous interpretation embraced by the Trump administration.

Antonin Scalia

Also quintessentially American for Trump/Vance/Johnson/Thune (it takes a village) is the deployment of roving bands of ICE thugs to kill American citizens as they exercise First Amendment rights and seize and imprison aliens outside and inside courthouses as they attempt to exercise due process rights guaranteed them under the Fifth Amendment.[2]  Not waiting for a second to exploit the opportunity presented by Mr. Allen’s mad dash, Trumpers immediately argued that it demonstrated the need for Democrats to fold on their principled opposition to full funding of the Homeland Security appropriation until ICE thuggery is reigned in.

Also not only American, as per Trump, but essential to its restored greatness and “hot[ness]” are the deaths that have resulted from measles outbreaks in numerous American cities and the promise of more deaths from an imminent surge in whooping cough, though not yet Yaws or Pellagra.  The administration’s crown jewel legislation, the 2025 Budget Reconciliation, holds that it is truly American to deprive millions of health insurance, as occurred earlier this year, with a large segment of those now uninsured being the late middle-aged, not yet eligible for Medicare.  A spike in deaths will follow.

RFK fleeing White House Correspondents’ Dinner

All of these policies do violence and cause death to Americans.  And those killings are intentional because the policies that cause them were enacted and implemented with knowledge aforethought that the number and pace of deaths would increase.

Were I to sing about the administration’s environmental, climate and renewable energy policies, the music would attract enough trombones to fill the hoped for ballroom whose necessity Donald trumpeted right after he left the Hilton Hotel crime scene.

The violence and deaths inevitable and intentional with Trump’s domestic agenda also extend to his foreign policies.  Like the virtual termination of U.S.A.I.D., the massive reduction in PEPFAR programs and the millions who will as a result die in African countries that Trump has labeled “shitholes.”

And then there are the 54 boat strikes (and counting) ordered by Pistol Pete Hegseth and the 185 resulting summary executions (and counting) from those strikes – including the two men murdered while holding on to their partially submerged boat.

I could, but for the moment decline to, continue singing of Trump’s depravity eclectic, but instead will end with these thoughts about the coming midterm election and the First Lady’s first public comments after the attempt to kill her husband and possibly her as well.

I believe that Trump would have defeated either Harris or Biden in 2024, without the bumps he got from the two assassination attempts that year.  Whether through sympathy or recognition of his tenacity after the Butler Pa. attempt, Trump’s margin of victory increased and control of the House may have been determined.

I ardently argue against voters giving Republicans any such bump this fall for similar and similarly illogical reasons.  And of the now suddenly talkative Trump Uxor, who recently demanded the Epstein victims testify publicly before Congress, her second act was characteristically an attack on Jimmy Kimmel’s First Amendment rights.  She did this directly after Saturday night’s cancellation of a tribute to the First Amendment.  For those who haven’t seen Kimmel’s April 23 mock Whitehouse Correspondent’s Dinner here it is.  It ranks among Kimmel’s finest and is one of the two best recent commentaries on Trump, along with Thomas B. Edsall’s April 21 NY Times essay titled “Easily The Worst President In U.S. History” that begins “[t]he Damage that President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.”  And though he’s killing many of us intentionally, please don’t try to kill him.

[1]  Not only did Nino pull off those interpretive gymnastics but ignored the fact that the term “bear arms” was specifically a military term of art in the 18th century.

[2]   The amendment’s guarantee of due process before deprivation of “life, liberty or property,” extends to “any person” not just American citizens.