Well, the good news is that there is now an opening for a substitute teacher in Torrance, California.  Cole Allen, a recent ‘teacher of the year’, will not be returning to his workplace any time soon. The bad news is that there has been a third assassination attempt on the life of US President Donald Trump. No other US president in a quarter of a millennium has ever been targeted three times.

Now the immediate response of the legacy media and of most of the progressive-left cosmos has been to lament all political violence and cast this as a problem that affects both sides of politics. But is that true?  Hmmm. I don’t recall any attempts to murder Joe Biden. Or Bill Clinton (or his wife Hillary). Or Barack Obama, the first black president of the US who would have been an obvious target had the much-discussed ‘far right extremism’ been as prevalent as the legacy media talking heads made it out to be.

But perhaps that is too haphazard, anecdotal and even casuistic a way to argue. So here are some reputable polling data. YouGov (the pollster that leaned most towards Kamala Harris before the last election and which nobody claims is friendly to Republicans) asked in September 2025 whether political violence is acceptable. Of those under 45 who identified as liberal/progressives, 26 per cent answered ‘yes’. For conservatives under 45 it was 7 per cent. That’s almost four times higher for the progressive left people. The Democracy Institute recently asked ‘Is violence ever justified to achieve political goals?’ Democrats responded 31 per cent in favour, 66 per cent against. Republicans responded 19 per cent in favour, 76 per cent against. (And yes, it is bizarre that in both groups a small number were effectively undecided.)  Another survey asked whether it is okay to feel happy when a political opponent dies.  For those under 44 years of age, 22 per cent of liberal-progressives answered ‘yes’. For conservatives under 44 it was 6 per cent. I’m not saying there are no polls anywhere in the US showing conservatives to be more bloodthirsty. But they aren’t being produced by YouGov.

Then there was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A surprising number of progressive left-wingers either half-celebrated this murder or sophistically justified it. Or they changed gears and attacked his widow.  Almost immediately. Don’t forget all the many attacks, too, on Elon Musk’s Teslas.  Attacks on Tesla facilities and attacks on individual cars that some indignant, self-righteous progressive somehow believed justified running a key down its side or some other bit of vandalism. (Bad news for these morons, it turned out Teslas have cameras that captured these acts and sometimes led to prosecutions.)

Or look at successful and attempted presidential assassinations since the Civil War.  Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and JFK all were murdered. Only Kennedy was a Democrat. As for attempts, there was Teddy Roosevelt (running as a former president), Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (three times!) All Republicans.  After this past weekend’s third attempt Mr Trump was asked why he was such a target. His answer was half-right. Trump said it was because he was actually doing things – being impactful – to change society. And he is. He has closed the border. He has taken on the transgender lobby. Exposed the NGO grifters. Fought the whole international law establishment, including having withdrawn from all sorts of woeful supranational bodies. (As I have said repeatedly, international law barely has a democratic bone in its entire body, is a top-down elite-driven product, and should never be deferred to when it conflicts with the domestic law of a democratic country like ours or the US or Britain.) Trump has also fought against the climate change net zero types, some of whom do rather well financially out of their deep commitment to the planet (if I can be allowed to put it that way). He’s gone hand-to-hand with the woke, DEI obsessives. He’s not backed down from fighting the Ivy League universities on all this. He’s called out the lefty media. The man is going down the list of his pre-election promises and doing what he can – Republicans in Congress, and especially in the Senate, are proving to be spineless, barely passing any laws at all to help their President out – to deliver on each one.

And that leads on to the unspoken, second part of why Mr Trump is such a target. He is doing things but things the progressive wokesters despise. Worse, Trump is being quite successful. He is hitting back at progressive, left-wing orthodoxies in a way other Republican presidents did not. Or the way Boris Johnson in Britain did not. (Heck, the way all other Tory PMs since Maggie Thatcher did not.) Or the way all Australian Liberal PMs since John Howard did not. (Tony Abbott never really got a chance because the Labor-lites in his party room removed him before he could – thereby initiating the catastrophic decline we see today of the party of Robert Menzies.) That, readers, is why so many on the left side of politics in the US loathe President Trump.

We have all seen it. The cutesy, barely disguised, allusions to acceptable violence that come with comparing Mr Trump to Hitler and Mussolini and fascist dictators and that run in the New York Times, MSNBC, or were mouthed by Joe Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, Hillary, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, myriad Ivy League professors and Hollywood stars, the list goes on. I bet a fair few of you readers have spoken to people who seem completely deranged in their takes on Trump. Look, if you compare him to Hitler or Mussolini you are just stupid. And wrong.  And let’s be honest. A fair few right-of-centre types make this sort of comparison too.

But here’s the thing. This sort of talk encourages violence. Hitler deserved to die.  If someone could have killed him in the early or mid-1930s, or later, the world would have been a better place. So what you’re saying – all the tricksy, Jesuitical pretences aside – when you make these inflated claims about Trump is that ‘yes, in a half-hearted, kinda way this would be a good thing’. Hitler deserved to die so that’s one point of the comparison. Right? Over drinks I’ve heard people actually say it explicitly. Heck, half of Hollywood seems to say it on a weekly basis.

And so we come back to our would-be assassin the Californian teacher Cole Allen.  His manifesto hit all the main Democrat talking points. He donated to Kamala and predicted she’d win all the swing states. His worldview seems not all that much different to what you’d get on a late-night talk show or an episode of The View. He just acted on these absurdities, as someone was likely to do. He shot a Secret Service man. His life is now ruined. He’ll be in jail for decades.

What a polarised, pre-Civil-War-like world the Americans now inhabit. And it’s not all that much different in Britain. We in Australia seem intent on moving that way.  I put huge blame on the legacy media and other cultural institutions that are wall-to-wall chock-full of progressive lefties. The ABC can’t employ one single identifiable conservative. And the Libs do nothing when in office.

So for me, Trump’s virtues vastly outweigh his crass, self-promoting vices. And the left knows he’s achieving things. That’s why they quietly paint him as someone – sort of – deserving of death. We’re lucky they’re zero for three.