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Killing Presidents

When Democrats don’t get their way at the ballot box.

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Leftists tried twice during the 2024 campaign to murder President Trump. Now he is president again nevertheless, and we all pray and hope that he will finish out his term safely, having made America great again over the next four years. The left, however, will, as usual, be attempt to thwart him every step of the way, and given its utter lack of conscience and morality, could very well resort to violence again. It is noteworthy, after all, that all of the successful assassinations of presidents in the United States have aided the cause of one of the most malignant organizations in human history, the Democrat Party.

There have been four assassinations of presidents in American history, and every one of them was either committed by a far-leftist or has aided the Democrats. The Democrat party did not actively engineer the assassinations for its own advantage, but nevertheless, every time a president has been killed, the Democrats were the beneficiaries.

When Abraham Lincoln became the first president to be murdered while in office, the Democrat party, which had supported slavery and split over secession (with most of its constituency joining the Confederacy), unexpectedly got a new lease on life. This came, paradoxically, because of the Republicans’ efforts to foster national unity as the Civil War was raging. In 1864, Lincoln had run for reelection on a national unity ticket. The Republican party attempted to appeal to pro-Union Democrats by renaming itself the National Union party and choosing as Lincoln’s running mate one of the most prominent of the small band of Unionist Democrats, Andrew Johnson of the border state of Tennessee.

When the Confederate sympathizer and staunch Democrat John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, the party that was still in the midst of leading a massive and bloody insurrection against the federal authority in Washington was suddenly, to no one’s surprise more than its own, back in the White House.

Lincoln had called for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” but none of those who followed in his wake could figure out how to deliver that, and most weren’t even interested in trying. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, President Andrew Johnson opposed the enfranchisement and equality of rights of black Americans. In this, Johnson departed from Lincoln’s course, as his martyred predecessor had favored civil rights for the freed slaves. In May 1865, Johnson granted amnesty to all ex-Confederates except those who owned property worth $20,000 ($300,000 today), that is, virtually the entire former ruling class, and soon they were back in power in what came to be known as “the Solid South,” a segregationist Democrat voting bloc that lasted a century.

The Democrats benefited again on July 2, 1881, when a deranged man named Charles Guiteau stepped up behind President James A. Garfield and fired his gun twice, hitting him in the back and arm (Garfield died on Sept. 19). Guiteau cried out, “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is President!” Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, who had been awarded the Republicans’ vice presidential spot in order to balance the ticket. Garfield was a champion of civil service reform, while Arthur and Guiteau were Stalwarts, those who favored the “spoils system.” Under the “spoils system,” the president gave federal jobs to his supporters; proponents of civil service reform wanted such jobs to be given on the basis of merit.

Arthur surprised everyone by abandoning the Stalwarts and enacting Garfield’s program; he felt bound to do so since Garfield, not he, had been elected president.

For this, Arthur has been justly praised, but civil service reform has not turned out to be the unalloyed benefit that many assumed it would be. In fact, it allowed for the formation of the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy that now largely runs things in Washington. Chester Arthur unwittingly paved the way for the creation of the deep state that did so much to impede Trump during his first administration. Garfield would have had a hard time getting civil service reform passed; Arthur did so on a wave of sympathy for the martyred president. The road from there leads straight to the far-left dictatorial bureaucrats of our own day.

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