A Modest Case for Civility (Or: Please Stop Trying to Kill the Man You Hate)


Target keywords: Trump assassination attempt, left-wing media rhetoric, political violence, civility in politics, Butler Pennsylvania shooting, Ryan Routh, media incitement


America's New Hobby: Wishing Out Loud


There is a grand tradition in this country of saying things you don't really mean. "I'd kill for a good taco right now." "This traffic is murder." "If he wins again I'll move to Canada." We understand these as the harmless rhetorical flatulence of a free people blowing off steam. The trouble begins when the people saying these things are sitting U.S. congressmen's staffers, Democratic state representatives, and the entire primetime lineup of MSNBC, and the man they're aiming their metaphors at has just had a bullet remove part of his ear in a Pennsylvania cornfield.

At that point, perhaps, we pump the brakes on the colorful language.

But America did not pump the brakes. America floored it, took the off-ramp into the median, and then argued about who built the median.


Butler, Pennsylvania: The Shot Heard 'Round the Spin Room


On July 13, 2024, twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop at the Butler Farm Show, aimed an AR-style rifle at the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and fired eight rounds. One grazed Trump's right ear. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief shielding his family with his body, was killed. Two other men were critically wounded. Crooks was dead twelve seconds after his last shot.

It was, by any measure, the worst moment for presidential security since Reagan took a bullet in 1981. It was also, according to the editorial reflex of certain major American newsrooms, an opportunity for context.

CNN's initial headline: "Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally."

He fell. After an assassin's bullet hit his face. He fell. The man who had just experienced a politically motivated near-execution at a public rally fell, and CNN filed it somewhere between "wardrobe malfunction" and "trip on an uneven curb." The headline was later corrected, but not before the internet preserved it the way future anthropologists will preserve evidence of our collective madness.

The Washington Post went with: "Trump escorted away after loud noises at Pa. rally."

Loud noises. Technically accurate in the way that the Titanic incident could be described as "unexpected swimming."


The Bullseye and the Bull: Biden's Unfortunate Marksmanship


Five days before Crooks pulled the trigger, President Biden hopped on a private donor call and announced it was "time to put Trump in the bullseye."

The president of the United States. Used the word "bullseye." About Donald Trump. Five days before someone attempted to shoot Donald Trump in the head.

To his credit, Biden acknowledged on July 15 that the phrase "was a mistake." To his further credit, he explained he meant "focus" not "shoot." To the credit of absolutely no one, this is the political moment that made America have to specify: when we say "target," we mean it metaphorically.

The Republican response was swift and furious. Sen. JD Vance posted on X within hours of the shooting: "The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination." This was, if nothing else, a remarkable speed record for hot takes, achieved while the ear bandage was still being applied.

Speaker Mike Johnson, to his credit and measured tone, said simply: "Everyone needs to turn the rhetoric down." He then returned to running the House of Representatives, which suggests he was either very busy or very optimistic.


Don't Miss Next Time: A Staffer Speaks Her Truth


Within hours of the shooting, Jacqueline Marsaw, a case manager and field director for Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), took to Facebook to share her feelings. Those feelings were, verbatim: "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."

"That wasn't me talking" is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting in that sentence. It is the verbal equivalent of a toddler pointing at a broken lamp and saying "the wind did it" — except the toddler is a federal government employee commenting on the near-murder of a former president, and the lamp is American democracy.

Marsaw was fired the following day. She later told the Natchez Democrat she had gotten "overwhelmed in the moment." Secret Service agents came calling. The Justice Department was reportedly briefed. The moment passed. But not before Colorado state Democratic Rep. Steven Woodrow posted: "The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil but here we are" — a Rolling Stones reference that aged roughly as well as a '72 Datsun in a hurricane.

Woodrow deleted the post and apologized. In the modern political economy, this counts as accountability.


Ryan Routh: The Man Who Wrote It Down


If Thomas Crooks was a mystery wrapped in a LinkedIn profile, Ryan Wesley Routh was a manifesto wearing camouflage. On September 15, 2024, the 58-year-old former North Carolina roofer parked himself in the bushes outside Trump's West Palm Beach golf course with an SKS rifle, a GoPro camera, ceramic body armor, and what we can only describe as a very ambitious to-do list.

He had been there for twelve hours. Twelve hours in a Florida bush in September. If political commitment were measured in bug bites, Routh deserved a medal.

He did not fire a shot. A Secret Service agent spotted the rifle barrel, fired four rounds, and Routh fled in a Nissan Xterra — a vehicle whose choice says almost as much about a man as his ideology. He was caught on I-95 within the hour.

But here is what separates Routh from your garden-variety unstable person: he wrote it all down. In April 2024, five months before the golf course incident, Routh left a 12-page letter in a box at a former coworker's house. It began: "Dear World, this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you. I tried my best… It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job."

He was pre-apologizing for a murder he hadn't committed yet, offering a bounty, and mailing it to someone's house. He also included burner phones and IED components in the box. As house-warming gifts go, this one lands somewhere between unusual and federal crime.

After his arrest, Routh sent letters to approximately forty news outlets. He challenged Trump to a "beatdown session." He compared himself to Thomas Crooks. He attempted to stab himself with a pen in the neck when his verdict was read on September 23, 2025. On February 4, 2026, Judge Aileen Cannon sentenced him to life without parole plus seven years — the extra seven years presumably for the pen incident and the general audacity.


The Resistance Hero Factory: How the Left Builds Its Losers


Here is the central absurdity that no cable network will say plainly: the "threat to democracy" messaging that Democratic strategists, media talking heads, and celebrity Twitter philosophers have marinated the American left in for eight years does not produce clear-eyed voters. It produces people who believe they are morally obligated to act. People like Routh, who wrote in a 2023 self-published book that electing Trump was "a terrible mistake" and described himself as a man willing to sacrifice for democracy — then parked in a bush with a rifle and a GoPro to livestream his heroism to a world that didn't ask for it.

The messaging machine told him Trump was Hitler. It told him democracy was dying. It told him, in the immortal words of a billion cable-news chyrons, that this was "the most important election of our lifetime" — and that Trump winning it would be an existential catastrophe. When you spend years telling people that a man is the literal embodiment of fascism who must be stopped at all costs, a certain small and unwell percentage of your audience will conclude that "all costs" is the operative phrase.

This is not complicated. It is, in fact, Rhetoric 101. You do not get to spend years calling someone Hitler and then express bafflement that someone showed up to the rally with a rifle.

Routh donated to ActBlue. He voted in the 2024 Democratic primary. He was, in every demographic and behavioral metric, the target audience for the resistance messaging. He took it seriously. He took it literally. He took it to a golf course in West Palm Beach with a GoPro.


The Civility Interlude: A 72-Hour Phenomenon


After Butler, there was a brief, shimmering moment of American unity. Biden gave a nationally televised address calling for lowering the temperature. World leaders condemned the attack. Archbishop Broglio issued a statement. The National Council of Churches called for an end to "toxic polarization." Trump himself, at the Republican National Convention, said: "The discord and division in our society must be healed."

It lasted about three days.

By August, Democratic ad buys were again describing Trump as a threat to democracy. By the September 10 debate, Harris and Trump were back to the full-contact rhetorical cage match. After the September 15 Florida incident, Biden again called for cooling rhetoric. The cycle repeated. The civility was real, in the way that a New Year's resolution to exercise is real — sincere, briefly visible, and gone by the time the gym gets crowded.

The miracle is that anyone was surprised.


A Guide to Remembering Corey Comperatore


Amid all the hot takes, the deleted posts, the network headline rewrites, and the Routh letters to the media, there was a 50-year-old man named Corey Comperatore who threw himself over his wife and daughters when the shots rang out at Butler. He was a former volunteer fire chief. He coached youth sports. He loved his family. He is dead because he attended a political rally in a country where someone decided that the solution to political disagreement was a rifle on a rooftop.

His wife Helen declined a condolence call from the president. She told the New York Post she did not want to speak to Biden. She had her reasons. They are her reasons to have.

Corey Comperatore is the answer to the question nobody in the civility debate wants to actually sit with: what does the ambient rhetoric cost? Not in polling points. Not in news cycles. In actual human lives. The man who died was not a politician. He was not a talking head. He was a guy at a rally who made the last decision of his life to stand between bullets and the people he loved.

The least the rest of us can do is stop handing people target coordinates and calling it commentary.


Five Things That Would Help, According to a Philosophy Major Turned Dairy Farmer


One: Stop describing your political opponents as the literal incarnation of evil and then act shocked when someone takes the description literally. If you call a man Hitler for eight years, and someone shows up to shoot him, you do not get to call that unforeseeable.

Two: Fire the staffer who posts "don't miss next time" before the blood is dry. This should not require explanation. It apparently does.

Three: News organizations: when a man gets shot at a campaign rally, the headline "loud noises at Pa. rally" is not neutral. It is cowardice in Associated Press style.

Four: The 72-hour civility window is not enough. You cannot lower the temperature with a press release and then raise it again by Labor Day. Pick a lane and stay in it, or admit you never meant any of it.

Five: Read the research on partisan antipathy from Pew Research. The numbers on how Americans view the opposing party are genuinely alarming. A meaningful percentage of both sides now view the other as a threat to the nation's way of life. When that's the shared premise, the next Crooks or Routh is not an aberration. He's a customer.


The Sincere Part (Don't Skip It)


Here is the honest truth underneath the jokes: a country in which people attempt to kill their presidents is a country that has failed at self-governance at the most basic level. It doesn't matter what you think of Trump. It doesn't matter what you think of his policies, his character, his diet, or his hair. Political violence is the end of the argument, not a continuation of it. It is what happens when a society decides it no longer has to persuade, only to eliminate.

The American experiment has survived a Civil War, two World Wars, and four presidential assassinations. It has not survived by accident. It has survived because enough people, in enough critical moments, chose argument over ammunition. Democracy is not maintained by the people who agree with each other. It is maintained by the people who disagree and still show up the next morning to argue again.

The media that nudges its audience toward "someone should do something" and then clutches pearls when someone tries to do it is not a free press. It is an arsonist with a press credential. The politicians who spend four years calling their opponent an existential monster and then issue a statement of shock when an audience member takes them at their word are not leaders. They are liability disclaimers walking around in suits.

We are better than this. We have been better than this. We can be better than this again.

Just maybe, for once, let's try not waiting until someone loses an ear to remember it.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

This piece of American satirical journalism was produced through a collaboration between the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. The events depicted are real. The people who ducked responsibility for them are also real. The ear is no longer bleeding, but the republic's is. Bohiney.com is an American satirical publication. No actual assassination attempts were endorsed, encouraged, or workshopped during the writing of this article. If you believe otherwise, you may be exactly the target audience we've been discussing. https://bohiney.com/a-modest-case-for-civility/