CBS’s Dickerson: Assassination Attempt on Trump Is ‘New Test’ to Exercise ‘Restraint’ and ‘Grace’

CBS News Chief Political Analyst and Senior National Correspondent John Dickerson stated that the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump was a “new test” for people to exercise “restraint” and “grace” in their responses and opinions.

Dickerson spoke about how one American, Corey Comperatore, a former Pennsylvania fire chief, husband, and father had been killed after a gunman opened fire and attempted to assassinate Trump, while two others were left critically injured.

The former president was left injured after he was shot by a bullet “that pierced the upper part” of his right ear.

“Saturday, one of our fellow Americans died because he supported a political candidate, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness,” Dickerson said. “All that we seek and is promised in campaigns, stolen. Two more are critically wounded for the same reason.”

.@jdickerson on the assassination attempt of Donald Trump:

"This is a new moment, a new test. Not to stop thinking or slow the vigorous fight of ideas, but to respond with what we all know has been missing from public debate: restraint, grace and the instinct to forgo an… pic.twitter.com/wBgZevTI5E

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 14, 2024

“Former President Donald Trump mercifully dodged a bullet by a distance of inches, maybe less,” Dickerson added. “A distance that now measures the space between whether this reprehensible attack on a candidate and our democratic system will further inflame the political climate, or shock us into a retreat from our usual reactions.”

Dickerson added that people’s “usual response” to this type of tragedy would be to sort it “by our partisan reflexive acrimony and fear,” adding that people’s “desire” to affirm their “existing beliefs and fresh attacks” was what got us to this place.

“This is not just one more crazy turn in our crazy politics, this is a new moment, a new test,” Dickerson continued. “Not to stop thinking, or slow the vigorous fight of ideas, but to respond with what we all know has been missing from public debate, restraint, grace, and the instinct to forego an advantage when something larger is at stake. This tragedy has reminded us all of those stakes.”

The call for people to show “restraint” and “grace” in their responses to the attempted assassination of the former president comes after the mainstream media has for years compared Trump and voters who support him as a political candidate, to being Hitler and nazis.

In an article from May 2024, Politico notes:

Since Donald Trump emerged on the national political scene in 2015, journalists and pundits have been debating whether it’s appropriate to compare him and the MAGA movement to the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe – and, more specifically, to the Nazism that gained traction in Germany throughout the 1920s. Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison. Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump, the editorial boards for outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post began spreading the blame to both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party for what had occurred.

Both outlets have published numerous op-ed articles comparing Trump to Hitler.

In December 2023, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”

Mike Hale, the TV critic for the New York Times wrote in an article in June 2024:

Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazi’s characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”

In October 2017, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Trump Isn’t Hitler. But the Lying….”:

Trump is no Hitler, but the way he has manipulated the American people with outrageous lies, stacked one on top of the other, has an eerie historical resonance. Demagogy has a fixed design.

It  should be mentioned that Vanity Fair reported in 1990 that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, “told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” The magazine pointed out that “Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.” (At the time, Trump said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Trump has found a way to couch the lies so that people believe they don’t emanate from him but pass through him. He is not a producer but a projector.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, for several years the mainstream media and Democrat politicians have attempted to draw comparisons between Trump and Hitler and have painted him as being a “threat to democracy.”

Donald Trump Jr., the oldest child of the former president slammed the media and Democrats for trying to cast blame on “both sides” for the assassination attempt on Trump.