Longtime pollster and author John Zogby, decrying the hatred in today’s political discourse, said that he has heard people wishing for the assassination of President Trump.
“I have heard many – and please don’t deny this because you have heard it as well – actually wish that it would happen. And they either joke about it or half joke about it,” he said in a column headlined, “Would You Take A Bullet for Trump?”
Zogby, who grades Trump in our Secrets Weekly White House Report Card, added, “Now it has come to wishing violence on an incumbent.”
He was reacting to a thread on the blog Quora with the same title as his column. Many of the comments said that the Secret Service should not take a bullet, and, he wrote, “In an otherwise sane and intelligent online forum, we read hateful comments and arguments for killing.”
Of course, he adds, there were similar suggestions against former President Obama, but he said it has gotten worse with Trump.
“What on earth is happening to us? It wasn’t that long ago that there was a sense of duty that went along with being a good American citizen and, I might add, a decent fellow human being. But what we as Americans have always shared together – a love of freedom, democratic institutions, a common purpose – has degenerated into partisan and ideological totalitarianism. It is my way or the highway. Otherwise nice people say they would not a shed a tear if Mr. Trump were assassinated, nor would their counterparts on the other side have wept if Mr. Obama had been killed in office,” he wrote.
In the Forbes column, Zogby concluded:
Mark this conversation on Quora as the second worst in American history. The first was the nation’s Civil War where more than 500,000 Americans actually died. For the many of us still haunted by the all-too-real assassination of a U.S. president, this discussion is upsetting and it needs to stop.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
