It's dangerous when the most mentally unbalanced people on both sides believe they're struggling to defeat evil

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Americans accustomed to treating electoral politics as a war between good and evil are discovering that some of their compatriots have embraced a crusade against evil. This feeds a rising tide of political violence including, not incidentally, a second attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump in Florida on Sept. 15. The battle for control of the government has become too dangerous.

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“@POTUS Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free,” recent would-be assassin Ryan Routh posted on X earlier this year. “Trumps should be MASA …make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.”

Routh’s apocalyptic tone and words matched those of too many other participants in the United States’ increasingly rough political scrum.

While his actions were his own, his inspiration could be found by marinating in the country’s political climate. In a September 2022 speech in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden insisted: “We must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.”

On July 26, after assuming the role of Democratic standard-bearer, Kamala Harris called Trump “an existential threat to our democracy and our most fundamental freedoms.”

The day after the latest assassination attempt, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton castigated the press for its alleged lack of a “consistent narrative” about “Donald Trump, his demagoguery, his danger to........

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