(The Daily Signal)—Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.
The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.
“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
“These proclamations aren’t sarcastic; they’re literal, and they’re being spoken by high-profile politicians and members of the mainstream media with massive audiences,” Angelo added. “It’s shocking that there have been two attempts on President Trump’s life, but not surprising given the existential hyperbole about him pounding Americans’ ears day in and day out.”
Other Violent Threats to Trump
Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who authorities say shot Trump in the right ear July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, the man suspected of planning to assassinate the former president Sunday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, got surprisingly close to the former president.
However, New Tolerance Campaign identified five others who faced charges for threatening to harm or kill Trump.
In January 2021, a judge sentenced 53-year-old Connecticut resident Gary Joseph Gravelle to nine years in prison after his conviction for sending a letter threatening to kill Trump in September 2018.
In January 2022, police arrested and charged New York City resident Thomas Welnicki, 72, with calling the Secret Service and threatening to kill Trump. He proclaimed that he intended to “stand up to fascism” by assassinating the former president.
In August, police arrested Arizona resident Ronald Lee Syvrud, 66, and charged him with threatening Trump’s life during the former president’s campaign trip to the Copper State.
In July, police arrested and charged Florida resident Michael M. Wiseman, 68, with making written threats to kill Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, after the assassination attempt in Butler.
Last month, police arrested and charged Illinois resident Justin Lee White, 36 with repeatedly threatening Trump, police, and Republicans with violence if the former president didn’t “play fair” during the election campaign.
Where would Welnicki get the idea that standing up to “fascism” involves targeting Trump? The full list of left-leaning pundits, celebrities, and politicians who compared Trump to Hitler would be too long to compile. But New Tolerance Campaign highlighted many examples, and The Daily Signal has narrowed them down to the list below. (The worst is at the bottom.)
None of the people in the list below responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment by publication time.
1. Shalom Auslander
Most Americans may not have heard of novelist Shalom Auslander, 54, but in 2016 he penned an op-ed in The Washington Post claiming that comparing Trump to Hitler “belittles Hitler.”
Auslander first claimed that Hitler had evil plans, while Trump is “just a con man,” but then the novelist suggested that Americans today are “like Hitler’s willing executioners.”
“Will we look the other way, say we didn’t know, stand silently by while millions of our neighbors are rounded up, while women who get abortions are ‘punished,’ while immigrants are given ‘ideology tests’ and our leader heaps praise on oppressive tyrants?” he wrote.
The writer didn’t suggest that Trump would round up Jews and send them to concentration camps, but he did suggest Trump would “round up” Americans’ “neighbors” in a similarly ominous way.
2. Linda Ronstadt
Rock and country singer Linda Ronstadt, then 73, explicitly compared Trump to Hitler in July 2019.
Ronstadt, who is of Mexican descent, recalled that when Trump first announced his candidacy for president, she predicted, “It’s going to be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews.”
“And sure enough, that’s what he delivered,” she said. “It’s exactly the same.”
3. Joe Scarborough
Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” repeated the line that Trump posed an existential threat to America’s representative form of government.
Scarborough said last November that Trump “is running to end American democracy as we know it.”
“He will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country,” the MSNBC host said of Trump, whom he called an “authoritarian.”
‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough goes on UNHINGED Anti-Trump RANT: “He will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country. Just look at his past. It’s not really hard to read”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 21, 2023
4. Robert Kagan
Also last November, political scientist Robert Kagan argued in The Washington Post that if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election the odds are “pretty good” that his presidency will “turn into a dictatorship.”
Kagan warned that the “Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived.” He suggested that, if elected again, Trump would prevent free and fair elections in 2026.
5. Rachel Maddow
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow compared Trump to both Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Last December, Maddow said Trump “keeps saying the kinds of things, the exact kind of things, that Hitler and Mussolini said.”
“There’s a reason Hitler and Mussolini said this stuff, too. It worked then, it works now,” she added. “It has worked abroad all over the world and yes, it has worked here, too. More than we like to remember.”
6. Will Stancil
Will Stancil, then a candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives for District 61A, posted a suspicious question on the social media site X.
“So is there any reason [Joe] Biden couldn’t just drone strike Trump and end this,” Stancil, who currently has more than 89,000 followers, wrote in January. He then deleted the post.
Hi @whstancil! Why did you delete this? pic.twitter.com/3xZmxIE2j6
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 14, 2024
This post arguably fits with an extremely negative view of those whom Stancil considers Trump’s supporters.
Stancil’s campaign platform stated that the candidate is “committed to listening to voices across the political spectrum—with a key exception.”
“For over a century, far-right extremists have not been motivated by sincere ideological belief but an inner desire to commit violence, dominate the weak, bully the unpopular, and mock the unusual,” his platform read. “Their policy commitments are typically insincere or even nonexistent; their motive force is the pleasure they take in causing pain.”
7. Keith Olbermann
In March, Trump said that the “hostile press” treats him worse than Abraham Lincoln. The Biden-Harris reelection campaign posted Trump’s clip, noting: “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated.”
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann reposted the Biden-Harris campaign video, saying, “There’s always the hope.”
Olbermann deleted the tweet and clarified that he hoped Trump gets treated badly, although his original post could be interpreted to mean that he hoped Trump got assassinated.
“I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln,” Olbermann said. “As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON.”
8. Robert De Niro
In May, actor Robert De Niro echoed Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by warning that “under Trump,” America’s current “kind of government will perish from the Earth.”
“If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted,” the actor declared in a speech outside the building where Trump’s controversial trial for falsifying business records was taking place.
“And elections, forget about it. That’s over,” De Niro told reporters. “That’s done. If he gets in, I can tell. you right now, he will never leave. He will never leave. You know that.”
🚨 TDS Alert
Democrats Brought out Robert De Niro to Tell the World what would Happen if Donald Trump Becomes President…
• The government will perish from earth
• Kiss your freedoms goodbye
• Elections will be over forever
• If he gets in, he will never leaveOnly problem… pic.twitter.com/8k78xLuZbC
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) May 28, 2024
The month after the first Trump assassination attempt, on July 13, saw more extreme rhetoric.
9. Jacqueline Marsaw
A former congressional aide for Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., posted on Facebook that a potential Trump assassin should try not to miss “next time.”
“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,” Jacqueline Marsaw wrote in the post.
Thompson said he fired Marsaw. His office didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request to connect with Marsaw for comment after the second assassination attempt.
NEW: Staffer for Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) no longer employed after social media post insinuating that Trump’s shooter shouldn’t have missed. @BennieGThompson statement:
“I was made aware of a post made by a staff member and she is no longer in my employment.” pic.twitter.com/3JhmZYYjCb
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 14, 2024
10. Randi Weingarten
At the opening of the American Federation of Teachers convention in mid-July, AFT President Randi Weingarten condemned Trump as an “existential threat to democracy.”
Weingarten, head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, spoke more than a week after the assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania.
Randi Weingarten says Trump is an "existential threat to democracy":
"The November elections will determine which path we take.. it is seldom a dramatic event or attack that lets fascism in the door. The violence comes later, after they are voted in."
Unhinged lunatic. pic.twitter.com/87K6mYDhKP
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 22, 2024
11. Billie Joe Armstrong
Billie Joe Armstrong, the 52-year-old lead singer of the rock band Green Day, lifted a Trump mask that many critics described as a “decapitated head” during a concert in Washington, D.C.
The mask had the word “idiot” scrawled on it.
I’m not a part of the maga agenda #greenday pic.twitter.com/B8JP8bBl62
— Green Day Inc. (@GreenDayInc) July 30, 2024
12. Steven ‘Destiny’ Bonnell
Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, a 35-year-old influencer who goes by the name “Destiny” and gained a large audience by livestreaming video games on YouTube, said he did not have “much sympathy” for Trump supporters after the first assassination attempt.
“I don’t think I have much sympathy about the attempt enough to chastise people celebrating it,” he said.
Bonnell stood by this statement after English journalist Piers Morgan pressed him on it.
In a livestream video, Bonnell also stated: “I’m ready for the f**king great cleansing” when “we genocide conservatives in this country.”
Destiny: "I'm ready for the f**king great cleansing. when we genocide conservatives in this country.”
Destiny just threatened to shoot Conservatives.
pic.twitter.com/DNaTwcUgkv— aka (@akafacehots) July 18, 2024
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
