Donald Trump is grasping at plausible deniability after his suggestion that “the Second Amendment people” might be able to do something to stop a President Hillary Clinton from choosing judges. He didn’t mean what he so clearly meant, he and his campaign insist. But this kind of rhetoric has precedents, and at least one of those precedents did lead to an assassination, as Thomas Friedman (I know, I know, but every couple of decades he gets one right) details:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated.
His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him as a “traitor” and “a Nazi” for wanting to make peace with the Palestinians and give back part of the Land of Israel. Of course, all is fair in politics, right? And they had God on their side, right? They weren’t actually telling anyone to assassinate Rabin. That would be horrible.
But there are always people down the line who don’t hear the caveats. They just hear the big message: The man is illegitimate, the man is a threat to the nation, the man is the equivalent of a Nazi war criminal. Well, you know what we do with people like that, don’t you? We kill them.
David S. Cohen breaks it down in Rolling Stone:
Predicting any one particular individual following his call to use violence against Clinton or her judges is statistically impossible. But we can predict that there could be a presently unknown lone wolf who hears his call and takes action in the future.
Stated differently: Trump puts out the dog whistle knowing that some dog will hear it, even though he doesn't know which dog.
There are a lot of possible dogs hearing Trump’s words. And a lot of them own guns.
But if someone does take him at his all too obvious meaning, he’ll be right there insisting he never suggested anything like that.