COLUMN: The Attack on Trump and the Cult of Hate: When the White House Turns a Tragedy into a Political Weapon

John Hinckley Jr., Sirhan Sirhan: Men Alone in Their Obsession

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots at Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. He was 25 years old. He was obsessed with Jodie Foster and the movie Taxi Driver. No political party. No organization. An individual psychosis and a legally purchased firearm. Reagan survived. The Reagan administration did not blame “the left”—even though the political climate of the time would have allowed for such an interpretation. James Brady, the press secretary who was wounded that day and left paralyzed for life, became an advocate for gun control. Not to single out an ideological enemy.

On June 5, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was a Palestinian Christian, motivated by U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The investigation lasted for months. The conclusions were complex. In the hours that followed, no one reduced Sirhan’s act to “the cult of hatred coming from the right”—even though parallels could have been drawn. Because in 1968, even amid the most intense political violence, there remained room for complexity.

That space has shrunk. It has shrunk alarmingly since 2016. And this shrinkage is not the exclusive work of one side. But there is a difference between a political movement that produces toxic rhetoric and a government that turns that rhetoric into state policy. When the White House designates an enemy within from an official podium, it is not engaging in politics. It is doing something far more serious. It is fabricating a justification.

The Precedent of July 13, 2024: What Trump Said Then

On July 13, 2024, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Donald Trump and hit him in the right ear. Crooks was a registered Republican. He had also donated to progressive causes—the investigation revealed a muddled, unclassifiable political profile. The Biden administration, at the time, did not call a press conference to say, “This is hate speech coming from the right.” It condemned the act. It offered its wishes for a speedy recovery. It let the investigation take its course.

Donald Trump, for his part, used that moment to cement his image as a persecuted martyr—fist raised, face bloodied, America screaming behind him. It was powerful. It was effective. And it’s the same playbook being played out today, two years later, with a man wielding a knife who didn’t even manage to get close to his target. The script adapts to the ammunition at hand. Marcus Handley and his kitchen knife become, in this narrative, just as useful as Butler’s bullets.

Being President of the United States and Being at War with One’s Own Citizens

There is something deeply paradoxical—and deeply disturbing—about the stance of a man who wields the most extensive executive power on the planet and who simultaneously portrays himself as the victim of an ongoing conspiracy. Donald Trump commands the most powerful armed forces in human history. He appoints federal judges. He controls the tax system. He is, by institutional definition, the most protected man on Earth.

And yet, he is a victim. A victim of the press. A victim of the judges. A victim of the left. A victim of a “deep state.” A victim, now, of a “cult of hate.” This stance is no psychological accident. It is a calculated, meticulously crafted political strategy, tirelessly maintained. The powerful’s victim narrative serves to neutralize all criticism: attacking Trump means joining the cult. Questioning Trump means participating in the hate. Disagreeing with Trump means being an accomplice to Marcus Handley.

And that is where—precisely there—I must stop you—and myself—to consider what we are letting slide. Because if this line of reasoning takes hold, if this equation becomes the norm, then political opposition itself is criminalized. Not by a law. Not by a decree. By a narrative. And narratives, sometimes, do more damage than decrees.

The supporters who applaud—and the cost of their silence

In the hours following Karoline Leavitt’s press conference, Republican members of Congress responded. Not all of them. But many did. Matt Gaetz posted on X: “The left created this climate. The consequences are theirs to bear.” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “When you’ve been demonizing a man for years, don’t be surprised.” Jim Jordan said nothing—but Jim Jordan never says anything that could be held against him. This calculated silence is a form of approval more powerful than words.

What these voices don’t say—what they will never say—is that the rhetoric from their own camp has led to documented acts of violence. The 147 representatives who refused to certify the election results of November 3, 2020. The chants of “Hang Mike Pence” heard outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The death threats sent to Democratic elected officials, some of which led to arrests. These facts have names, dates, and court records. They exist. And they are waiting, somewhere in the archives, for someone to name them with the same force with which Karoline Leavitt named “the cult of hate coming from the left.”

Columbus, Ohio: Anger That Knows No Political Affiliation

Marcus Handley was an electrician. He earned $58,000 a year before his company, Midwest Electrical Solutions, filed for bankruptcy in October 2024, brought down by rising material costs and a string of three canceled contracts. He had a seven-year-old daughter, Avery, with whom he shared custody. According to neighbors quoted by the Columbus Dispatch in its April 27, 2026, edition, he had lost his apartment in January 2026 and had been sleeping in a van for three weeks.

Marcus Handley was not a left-wing activist. Marcus Handley was a man crushed by the economy, whom the social safety net had failed to catch, and whose rage found an outlet in the most visible face of the America that had crushed him. It is a story as old as human misery. It is a story that repeats itself in every country where inequality runs deep enough to cut to the bone. And it is a story that neither the right nor the left has any interest in telling as it is—because it puts a system on trial, not a political camp.

And yet, it is the only story worth telling. Avery Handley is seven years old. She’s at the age where she draws houses with yellow windows. She doesn’t belong to any political party. She has a father in detention and a shattered childhood. If, twenty years from now, she were asked what American politics did for her in the weeks following her father’s arrest, what would she say?

The Economics of Anger: Who Benefits?

The question we never ask directly enough is who benefits. Who profits from Marcus Handley’s existence? Who needs men like him—men who are broken, enraged, and out of control—to fuel a political narrative? The answer is uncomfortable for everyone. The left needs misery to justify its redistributive policies. The right needs violence to justify its security-first narrative. Marcus Handley, in that sense, was useful to everyone except himself.

And the White House, by turning him into a symbol of a “cult of hate,” did him the most cynical favor of all: it stripped him of his individuality, his story, his seven-year-old daughter, and his cold January pickup truck, to turn him into a piece in a political puzzle that existed before him and will continue after him. He is no longer a man. He is an argument.

The Statistics Nobody Wants to Read Together

Here’s what the numbers say, without partisan interpretation: According to the University of Chicago’s Center for the Prevention of Political Violence, acts of violence or threats directed at U.S. elected officials increased by 340% between 2016 and 2025. This increase affects targets from both sides of the political spectrum. Republican representatives have received death threats. So have Democratic representatives. Mayors, district attorneys, and elected judges at all levels of government have reported a sharp rise in physical threats since 2020.

These data do not belong to any political camp. They describe a climate. And this climate has been created by years of designating internal enemies, conspiracy rhetoric, and the normalization of the idea that the political opponent is not a competitor but an existential threat. This factory has workers on both sides. But it has foremen. And since January 2025, those foremen have had their office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And yet—and this is the “and yet” that’s hardest to write—it must be said: some progressive voices have contributed to the escalation. Not all of them. Not the majority. But some. The call to “confront” Republican elected officials in restaurants and airports, issued in 2018 by Maxine Waters, a representative from California. The hashtags that bordered on dehumanization. The content that celebrated—sometimes without saying so explicitly—the idea that “one less Trump” would be good news. These things exist. I’m not making them up. But they don’t make the left a “cult of hate.” And they don’t make Marcus Handley one of its followers.

Misleading symmetry and revealing symmetry

There are two types of symmetry in this debate. The first is false: it claims that “both sides are doing the same thing” and that everything is therefore equivalent. This kind of symmetry is intellectual laziness. It protects the stronger party—the one that holds power and the platform—by placing it on the same level as the one shouting at a protest. That’s not balance. It’s analytical capitulation.

The second symmetry is true and useful: it states that violent rhetoric is a problem that cuts across political lines, that no one is immune, and that the solution cannot come from singling out a single culprit but from a collective reform of the way we speak about our political opponents. This symmetry is uncomfortable for everyone. That is why no one chooses it. The White House prefers to point fingers. The opposition prefers outrage. And Marcus Handley awaits his trial in a cell in Columbus.

When the “cult of hate” swallows up all opposition

A shift has been taking place, slowly but methodically, in the official rhetoric of Donald Trump’s White House since January 2025. This shift consists of gradually narrowing the line between “political criticism” and “incitement to violence.” In 2025, this resulted in legal proceedings against journalists who had published classified documents. In March 2026, it took the form of an attempt—blocked by the Supreme Court—to prohibit media organizations from granting press credentials for official events without “prior editorial oversight.”

And now, in April 2026, through the public equation of “the left” with the perpetrator of a knife attack. If the left is responsible for Marcus Handley, then anyone who votes left, writes left, or thinks left is participating in a criminal enterprise. This is not a paranoid conclusion. It is the direct logic of Karoline Leavitt’s argument, taken to its logical conclusion. And that logic has a name in political history. It is not called “protecting democracy.”

I’m not saying that Trump is going to establish a dictatorship tomorrow. I am saying that the tools are being forged, one after another, piece by piece, in the silence of our habits that normalize every escalation. And that in twenty years, when historians study this period, they will note that the alarms were audible. That no one lacked information. That the problem was not blindness. It was the choice to look the other way.

Europe as an Observer and What It Should Understand

On this side of the Atlantic, we observe this sequence with a reassuring sense of distance and a troubling lack of understanding. Reassuring, because we tell ourselves that this cannot happen to us—that our institutions are stronger, our political culture more mature. Disturbing, because we said the same thing in 2016, in 2018, in 2020, and every time we said that, something we thought unthinkable became possible.

The mechanism that transforms an individual act into collective guilt, that labels a “cult of hate” without causal evidence, that designates an enemy within from the highest platform of the state—this mechanism does not respect geographical borders. It travels through algorithms. It spreads through discourse. It inspires imitators. And some of them already have their own platforms, in our own capitals, and are beginning to test the same formulas on our own minorities, our own media, and our own judges.

In Columbus, Ohio, a woman is still watering her rose bushes

Linda Prescott is 68 years old. She lives two blocks from the building where Marcus Handley lived before he lost his apartment. She knew him by sight—he had helped her fix her circuit breaker in November 2024, for free, because he had the time and the skills. She learned of his arrest while watching the news. “He was a broken man,” she told the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday morning, as she continued to water her rose bushes. “Not a monster. A broken man.”

Linda Prescott doesn’t vote the same way Marcus Handley does—she’s been a Republican since Reagan. She doesn’t approve of what he did. But she refuses to reduce him to a pawn in a political narrative. That resistance—that ability to see a human being where the official narrative sees only a pawn—is the most precious thing this story contains. And it’s the very thing Karoline Leavitt’s discourse has no use for.

That is why we write. Not to prove ourselves right against the White House. Not to defend “the left”—which doesn’t need me for that and has its own accountability to answer for. But so that Linda Prescott and her rosebushes, so that Marcus Handley and his daughter Avery, so that the 340% increase in threats against elected officials may survive the oblivion orchestrated by official narratives. The truth has no spin doctor. It needs people who persist in naming it.

The Republican voices that rejected the equation

There aren’t many of them. But they exist. Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee posted on Sunday: “Condemning violence is fine. Pinpointing its causes before the investigation is irresponsible. Let’s do our job.” Virginia Republican Representative Jennifer Kiggans, a former military doctor, said in a CNN interview: “I’m not ready to accuse 160 million Americans before we know exactly what was going on in that man’s head.”

These voices are in the minority. They face opposition even within their own camp. But they prove that resistance to the prevailing narrative isn’t a matter of party affiliation—it’s a matter of intellectual courage. And that this courage exists, even where we’d least expect it. This is, perhaps, the only truly comforting news of the week. Just one. And we must hold on to it.

The Legal Precedent That No One Mentions

There is one detail that almost all political columnists have avoided mentioning in their coverage of this incident. Marcus Handley, in his online writings, never explicitly called for violence against Trump. He expressed hatred for “the establishment”—a vague term that, depending on the context, encompasses both Obama-era Democrats and Bush-era Republicans. His court-appointed attorney, Patricia Wren, 44, of the Ohio Public Defender’s Office, stated Saturday evening that her client “has no documented ideological affiliation.”

If the federal prosecution chooses to build its case based on the White House’s narrative—by seeking to demonstrate that Handley was motivated by left-wing rhetoric—it will have to prove it in court with evidence, not with press conferences. And if it fails to do so—because the evidence does not exist—then Karoline Leavitt’s speech on April 26, 2026, will go down in the archives as something more serious than a mistake: a baseless collective accusation, delivered from the podium of the U.S. executive branch. Historians will weigh this.

We, too, should weigh this. Now. Not in twenty years. The passage of time makes mistakes easier to identify and harder to correct. We are living through this moment. We still have the ability to call what we see for what it is. Not tomorrow. Now.

What April 26, 2026, May Be Remembered For

Ten years from now, if anyone seeks to understand how a liberal democracy can normalize the designation of domestic enemies from its highest platforms, they will find the April 26, 2026, press conference. They will find Karoline Leavitt, 27, declaring without evidence that “the cult of hate coming from the left” caused the attack on Donald Trump. They will find that this statement was applauded by members of Congress. They will find that it was relayed by news networks without substantial questioning during the first 24 hours. And they will ask themselves: Where were those who should have resisted?

We are those people. Right now. April 26, 2026, is not yet in the history books. It is still in the present. It is still open to challenge, refutable, and can be called out for what it is. In a few weeks, it will be an archive. In a few months, it will be a precedent. In a few years, if no one has called it out, it will be the norm.

I don’t know if these words will change anything. I know they must be written. I know that Linda Prescott and her rosebushes deserve to be part of the story. I know that Avery Handley is seven years old and does not belong to any “hate cult.” I know that silence, in this specific context, is a form of complicity that I refuse to confuse with neutrality.

The question you’ll take away when you finish reading this article

Marcus Handley was an electrician. He repaired circuit breakers. He had a daughter named Avery. He had been sleeping in a van for three weeks. He took an 18-centimeter knife and charged at a presidential motorcade. He was arrested in twelve seconds. No one was hurt. And four hours later, his desperate act had become proof of a conspiracy involving 160 million Americans.

Can you still read that last sentence without feeling a tightness in your chest? If so, read it again. Take your time. Because the moment we read that sentence without reacting is the moment something important will have disappeared—not in American politics, but within us.

Marcus Handley. Forty-one years old. A seven-year-old daughter. A rage that had no political party. And a government that found one for him the very day he was arrested. That’s the story I had to tell you.

Avery Handley is seven years old. Somewhere in Columbus, she may be watering a plant in a yogurt container sitting on a windowsill—at her mother’s house now, since her father is in jail. She doesn’t yet know that she has become a pawn in a political narrative. She doesn’t yet know that her father has been turned into a building block in a story that existed before him.

Karoline Leavitt, however, knows it. Donald Trump knows it. Matt Gaetz knows it. And now we know it, too.

What you do with this knowledge is up to you. But it is no longer a decision made in ignorance.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist