"The Forgotten Lessons of Dallas 1963 and Memphis 1968"

My latest Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece

[Sorry for a second Just the Facts on the same day. Long time subscribers know my regular pace is a new piece every couple of weeks or so. Below is a reprint of my Wall Street Journal OpEd. It is online now for those who have a WSJ account and want to comment there. It will be in the paper tomorrow]

Incendiary political language has consequences. Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen agitated his supporters and culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy.

The Trump-Hitler comparisons started during the 2016 campaign, accelerated after the 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and reached a fever pitch in recent months.

In December, the Washington Post ran an article by Mike Godwin titled “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said in a TikTok video a week ago: “Let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” The New Republic’s June cover was a 1932 Hitler campaign poster altered to look like Mr. Trump. In its lead story, “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like,” the magazine editors wrote, “We can spend it”—the election year—“debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’ We unreservedly choose the latter course.”

This theme wasn’t limited to left-wing commentators. In December, Politico noted: “Comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” Biden campaign officials and surrogates have compared Mr. Trump to Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Even the president himself fell back on the Nazi comparison. At a December fundraiser he warned that Mr. Trump’s language “echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.” In a poor choice of words last week, the president told donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye.”

It is a shame that those who repeatedly talked about Mr. Trump as an existential threat hadn’t studied how the volatile atmosphere in 1963 Dallas and 1968 Memphis, Tenn., emboldened Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to assassinate John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Dallas, where 24-year-old Oswald lived, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy propaganda and right-wing extremism. Anticommunists had portrayed the president as a traitorous appeaser of the Soviet Union. Ted Dealey, owner and publisher of the Dallas Morning News, had presented JFK a nine-page broadside during a personal meeting at the White House. Dealey said: “It is better to die than to submit to communism and slavery.”

Kennedy was repeatedly portrayed as a socialist threat to the republic. Edwin Walker, a retired Army general and failed candidate for governor, led the John Birch Society’s campaign warning that JFK was secretly planning to cede U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations. Integration and civil rights added to the anti-JFK fervor. The head of the country’s largest Baptist congregation condemned Kennedy and his allies as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up!”

In the months before Kennedy got to Dallas, King had visited and there had been a bomb threat. When U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited a month before JFK, an angry mob attacked him. On JFK’s arrival in November, a full-page, black-bordered advertisement in the Morning News accused the president of being a Communist tool. Walker posted thousands of handbills along the streets with an image of Kennedy and the message “WANTED FOR TREASON.”

After JFK’s murder, Dallas was widely referred to as a “city of hate.” Oswald was no right-winger, but the local atmosphere made him feel like less of a fringe outsider.

The same was true in Memphis in April 1968. King was no stranger to threats against his life. He had visited Miami not long before, and there were so many threats that the police begged him not to leave the hotel. A lot of white Americans were frightened of King’s message that “America is still a racist country.” A Harris poll not long before his death gave him a nearly 75% disapproval rating. Many Americans thought he hated the country, hated white people, or was a communist.

In Memphis, after riot police had used indiscriminate force to stop some 1,000 sanitation workers and supporters during a march, the strike became a nasty battleground for racists. Commentary from elected officials and local media fed a lurid narrative that King was a race-baiting troublemaker whose far-left supporters made him a danger not only to Memphis but to the country itself. King’s Poor People’s Campaign march, planned for June in Washington, had become a target for right-wing critics. Newspaper editorials warned about “suspicions of communist influence.” King was painted as a narcissistic radical who threatened to cause a race war.

Ray, who died in 1998, took his reason for killing King to the grave. There is no doubt, though, that he was heartened by the anti-King hysterics. He wanted to get to apartheid South Africa after the assassination, expecting to find a sanctuary.

As with Oswald, who was murdered two days after he killed Kennedy, we may never know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for shooting Mr. Trump. But politicians, media figures and all citizens must ask whether the constant drumbeat of Trump as Hitler might have created an atmosphere in which an unstable 20-year-old was encouraged to take a shot.

There is a price to reckless speech that portrays public figures as threats to the American way of life. It can be the spark that helps push an assassin to act. It is impossible to separate the violence of political assassinations in modern American history from the temperature of the times. It takes only a little fuel to push someone into the history books as an assassin.