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Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."
How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.
What are the circumstances such that the "powers that be" would be able to assassinate Trump but not his VP? Especially if Dems take back the House, as predicted. Assassinating both of them would likely mean President Hakeem Jeffries.
The only people it really makes sense to assassinate are the other side's Supreme Court Justices while your side is in power. Then your side gets to replace them, and if you then don't pick octogenarians they'll sit for decades. However, that doesn't seem to be a tactic that has seen any use at all, while the President has been assassinated multiple times.
It’s almost like the people who assassinate public officials aren’t particularly rational.
That suggests an interesting speculative question: how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?
Most of the time, the effect seems to be neutral at best. Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism. Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state. James Earl Ray didn't kill the Civil Rights Movement but birthed a martyr. Charitably, Brutus may have delayed empire for a decade or so. Who knows what Oswald's political opinions were, but it's almost certain that they didn't come to fruition.
The only effective assassination I can really think of is Booth's. He managed to eliminate a politician who was a genuine driving force toward something the "deep state" wasn't particularly interested in, and it made the Reconstruction stillborn, with a new President not particularly interested in tackling a hard problem anyways. It was going to be a hard slog anyways, but he killed it with a bullet.
Maybe there were some Russian anarchists who maybe helped the serfs a bit?
Explicit note for any insane Motteizans (and lurking Feds): even ignoring morality, most of the time assassination seems useless at best and counterproductive at worst.
Where's the line between an assassination and a purge? Because if you kill enough people, that frequently makes a difference.
I'm taking a more limited definition of assassination: an individual who attempts to change how he is governed by killing an individual or small group who govern him. I'd say this excludes a government killing domestic opponents (governments can kill on a much grander scale, since they are not the governed but the governors) and soldiers killing other soldiers (two governments sending their governed to kill each other to resolve a dispute).
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