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This article is about three types of assassination. 

The first, which President Trump has endured nonstop since he first entered the political arena, is character assassination. 

The second is legal assassination, sometimes called “lawfare.” The term is appropriate, because it is derived from warfare.  This is the attempt to lawlessly, but under the guise of law, bankrupt, ruin, defame and even imprison a dangerous political opponent. In extreme cases, this opponent might even face life imprisonment, which is a legal equivalent of the death penalty.  (Murderers are often given the death penalty or life in prison, which some people say is a fate worse than death.)

And finally, when all else fails, there is actual assassination. 

These three types of assassination are connected, and typically one leads to another. 

During the English Civil War, King Charles I, who admittedly was a tyrant, was subjected to a lengthy volley of complaints and accusations. This was character assassination aimed at producing his overthrow — political assassination.  Then he was tried by the Rump Parliament, but it was a bogus trial, mainly consisting of crimes that were made up solely in order to convict him.  Charles was only guilty of laws passed ex post facto by the Parliament; he was then retroactively found to have violated those laws. 

Finally, Charles was executed, a supposedly lawful penalty for his crimes, but since the crimes themselves were bogus, the execution amounted to an assassination.

The point is that while Charles was indeed a tyrant, the process of his deposition and murder were no less lawless — no less tyrannical — than Charles himself. 

More recently, and closer to home, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865.  The Southern Democrats who led the Confederacy had been blackening Lincoln’s character for years, calling him a “gorilla” and a “tyrant.”  Secession itself amounted to a kind of lawfare, not only because it had no legal or constitutional basis — Lincoln’s only “crime” was that he had won the 1860 election, and secession was nothing more than a spurious attempt to invalidate the result of that election.  And of course, secession led rapidly to war: lawfare became warfare!

Finally, Booth murdered Lincoln, as part of a plot to kill the president, the vice president and the secretary of state.  Booth and his co-conspirators were Confederates.  Their minds had been poisoned by years of propaganda.  Booth genuinely believed Lincoln was a tyrant. His political motive was to get rid of Lincoln and energize the Confederacy to fight on even after the surrender at Appomattox less than a week earlier.  After shooting Lincoln, Booth jumped to the stage of the theater and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis,” which means “So it goes with tyrants.” 

With Trump, character assassination came first.  When it proved insufficient, it metamorphosed into lawfare.  We see this with the Stormy Daniels matter, which began as a sex scandal, aimed at showing Trump to be a philanderer and low-life.  Later, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg used the same set of facts — Trump’s lawyer paid Stormy Daniels to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement or NDA — to concoct a two-tiered crime: alteration of business records (a misdemeanor) and an attempt to violate federal campaign finance laws (a felony). 

One might wonder how Bragg gets so much out of so little.  But he got a jury conviction out of it, and for this entirely legal and legitimate transaction — NDAs are perfectly legal and wealthy individuals and businesses do them all the time — Trump faces 34 felony convictions and potentially many years in prison.  For a man of his age, this would be tantamount to a life sentence, a legal assassination. 

But even that was not enough, because just a few weeks ago Trump was the target of an assassin’s bullet that should have taken his life but almost miraculously only grazed his ear.  Then, soon after, a second attempt.

One might say that the wicked and lawless regime that has been out to get Trump from the outset is taking no chances.  This regime — run by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the whole Democratic gang — represents precisely the tyranny and lawlessness that Lincoln warned about in his 1838 Lyceum speech. The only difference is that the regime now controls the levers of law.  So it deploys law itself to abuse the process of law.  It is a legal abomination. 

And when even this fails, it does what the Confederacy did with Booth: it poisons the minds of unstable and disturbed individuals so that two of them, on two separate occasions, took the law into their own hands and attempted to kill the former and potentially future president.

Whatever the ideology of these two men, their motive quite obviously was to get rid of a man they believed to be a danger to democracy and to the country.  They had obviously heard the libelous propaganda: Trump is Hitler circa 1933.  Quite likely they saw themselves as intrepid soldiers who had the foresight to take Hitler out before he could unleash a world war and murder millions of Jews as part of his “final solution.” In other words, the would-be assassins believed the lie that Trump is like Hitler, like Caesar, like Napoleon.  They, too, sought to make the point that Booth did — sic semper tyrannis. 

In a way, the two assassins were more sincere than the Democrats whose evil slander they had absorbed.  Immediately following the two failed assassination attempts, leading Democrats all offered “thoughts and prayers” to Trump.  They said they were “glad” he was safe, or hoping for his quick recovery; they disavowed political violence. 

But wait a minute! If Trump was truly Hitler — if they genuinely believed Trump was akin to Hitler — then they should be celebrating the assassination attempt, as indeed some on the Left did.  Their only regret should have been that the would-be killers missed. 

Thus, there is an unavoidable conflict between their premise (Trump is Hitler) and their conclusion (We are praying for Hitler to recover quickly).  Either the premise is false or the conclusion is false.  My view is that the Democrats never truly believed Trump is Hitler — in fact, they know he isn’t — but they use that base slander to demonize and dispatch a dangerous political opponent.  The danger Trump poses is not to liberty or to the republic but only to them and to their tyrannical schemes.

We should take note not merely of the diabolical schemes to destroy Trump by locking him up for life, or outright killing him, but also of how Trump has largely foiled these schemes.  It seemed impossible for a man facing 91 criminal charges and hundreds of years in prison to have the whole legal barrage deflected, turned back or tossed out, what podcaster Megyn Kelly calls the “inside straight.”  Who else could not only plow through the barrage undeterred, but even (at least to date) prevail?  Any other Republican — any other politician — facing 10 charges would exit the race, implode psychologically, and become a political nonentity and liability, never mentioned by his own side again. 

Trump, however, has shown he has the mettle to fight and to win.  In a way Trump found a way to turn even his vices into political virtues.  Consider, for instance, Trump’s ego.  Trump said in his early career that all successful people have a big ego. He doesn’t regard his ego as a liability but, in a business sense, as a motivating asset.  But now, in the political minefield, his ego serves a greater — one might even say nobler — purpose.  In a weird way, Trump’s ego has been a form of psychological self-protection through the political and legal trauma of the past several years.  Trump’s ego is his own personal wall, insulating him from the pressures that would surely debilitate, if not destroy, a normal person.

Drawing on inner strength and creativity, Trump used the lawfare against him to put the legal system itself on trial, and he exposed the sham machinations of a whole procession of Democratic prosecutors, judges and juries, all acting at the direction and behest of the Biden-Harris regime.  In a way, he vindicated his character through these cases, because he showed the American public that this is all they have on him, and if this is the best they can do, Trump must in fact be one of the cleanest, least corrupt figures on the whole landscape.  Who else could withstand such extensive scrutiny and come out almost entirely unscathed?  Only Trump!  This man has lived his entire adult life in the public eye and, as it turns out, he has had very little to hide.

Finally, even the assassination attempts proved to be to the benefit of Trump.  For one, they showed that he was a person important enough to be targeted.  Assassination, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.  Consider Biden or Harris, or even Romney or Paul Ryan.  Who would want to assassinate them?  It would be a waste of effort, and of ammunition. There is a reason no one ever attempted to assassinate Jimmy Carter.

Trump joined a rare and illustrious list of presidents or would-be presidents who faced assassination: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, RFK, Reagan.  And even in this elite company, Trump showed his mettle by the instinctive way he responded to the assassin’s bullets.  Here, a single moment, Trump showed his true greatness and proved he has more genuine virtue and character than all his critics combined.

Vindicating Trump, a new movie by Dinesh D'Souza

This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, Vindicating Trump, published by Regnery.  D’Souza’s movie of the same title will be in theaters nationwide on Sept. 27.  Get movie tickets and pre-order books at vindicatingtrump.com.

Image: Screen shot from Vindicating Trump website, by permission.