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


The Ear Heard 'Round the World


On July 13, 2024, a bullet grazed Donald Trump's right ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. One man died shielding his family. Two others were critically wounded. The shooter was twenty years old and had Googled "how far was Oswald from Kennedy" a week before.

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

He fell. After a bullet hit his face. He fell.

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

Loud noises. The Titanic was also a loud noise situation.


The Bullseye Problem


Five days before the shooting, President Biden told donors it was "time to put Trump in the bullseye." Five days later, someone tried. Biden acknowledged on July 15 it was "a mistake to use the word." Speaker Johnson said everybody needed to turn the rhetoric down. The civility lasted seventy-two hours, which in American politics counts as a sustained movement.

By Labor Day the ads were back. Trump was Hitler again. Democracy was dying again. Crisis graphics resumed their natural state.


The Staffer Who Said the Quiet Part Into a Megaphone


Within hours of the shooting, Jacqueline Marsaw, a field director for Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), posted on Facebook: "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 the work of ten lawyers in that sentence.

She was fired the next day. Colorado Democratic state Rep. Steven Woodrow posted "The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil" and deleted it before the echo died. Both went viral. Neither went to prison. America moved on by Tuesday.


The Man With the GoPro and the Twelve-Page Letter


Two months later, Ryan Wesley Routh parked himself in a Florida bush outside Trump's golf course for twelve hours with an SKS rifle, ceramic body armor, and a GoPro camera. He had donated to ActBlue nineteen times. He voted in the 2024 Democratic primary. He had previously written a self-published book calling Trump's election "a terrible mistake."

He did not fire a shot. A Secret Service agent spotted the rifle barrel and Routh fled in a Nissan Xterra — a getaway vehicle that says everything about the planning involved.

The remarkable part is what he left behind five months earlier: a twelve-page letter beginning "Dear World, this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you… 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. He included burner phones and IED components in the same box. As housewarming gifts go, this one skews federal.

On February 4, 2026, Judge Aileen Cannon sentenced him to life without parole plus seven years. The extra seven presumably for the GoPro.


The Hero Fantasy Factory


Here is the part nobody in media wants to say plainly: when you spend eight years telling people that one man is Hitler, an existential threat, a fascist who must be stopped at all costs — a small and unwell percentage of your audience will conclude that "all costs" is the operative phrase.

Routh was not a foreign agent. He was not a mystery. He was the target demographic of the resistance messaging, and he took it seriously. He took it literally. He took it to a golf course with a rifle and a camera because he believed he was making history.

He was making a federal case. Literally.

According to Pew Research on partisan antipathy, a significant share of Americans now view the opposing party as a threat to the nation's way of life. When that is the shared premise, the next Routh is not an aberration. He is a subscriber who finally acted on the newsletter.


What the Comedians Know


"If every election is the last election, democracy has had a very busy schedule." — Ron White, if he were being generous with the genre


"I grew up thinking politics was boring. Turns out it was just waiting for better production values." — Bill Burr, if Bill Burr ran a civility seminar


The Man Nobody Talks About


Corey Comperatore was a fifty-year-old volunteer fire chief from Buffalo Township, Pennsylvania. When the shots rang out at Butler, he threw himself over his wife and daughters. He was killed. His wife Helen declined a condolence call from President Biden. She had her reasons.

Comperatore is the answer to the question the civility debate refuses to ask: what does the rhetoric actually cost? Not in polling points. Not in news cycles. In human lives.

He was not a politician. He was a man 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.


Civility Is Not Surrender


You can oppose Trump's policies, vote against him, parody his speeches, and still insist he deserves to stay alive. That is not pro-Trump. That is pro-civilization. The distinction used to be obvious.

Defeat opponents with arguments, ballots, and occasionally better barbecue. Everything else is barbarism in a media package.

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 documented fact. The people who ducked responsibility for them are also documented fact. Bohiney.com is an American satirical publication. No actual assassination attempts were endorsed during the writing of this piece — unlike certain Facebook posts we could name. https://bohiney.com/?p=43024