Former President Donald Trump plays a lot of golf, and by all accounts is skilled at it. But the game of golf has a long history among U.S. presidents. William McKinley is believed to have been the first to play, starting in 1897, but the 350-pound William Howard Taft was the first president to take the game seriously, having taken up golf in 1894 with his brother Henry. Woodrow Wilson played over 1,000 rounds of golf while in office and even painted his golf balls black during the winter so that he could play in the snow.

Warren G. Harding trained his dog to go and fetch his golf balls. Calvin Coolidge was not particularly skilled at golf and eventually left his golf bag behind in the White House when his presidency ended. Before contracting polio, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a golf club champion. Dwight D. Eisenhower installed the first presidential putting green on the White House grounds and often played with his friend Arnold Palmer. John F. Kennedy played on the Harvard golf team and managed a single-digit handicap, although he shied away from the game as president, believing it to be an indication of a privileged lifestyle. Not one of the game’s greats, Lyndon B. Johnson found that inviting senators to join him for a game of golf would give him three or four hours to argue for legislation he favored. Richard Nixon was a fairly gifted golfer but removed the White House putting green and refused to play while in office, focusing his time and energy on his political ambitions. After Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, the first thing he did was play golf.

Ronald Reagan was recognized as a decent player, but not an avid one. George H.W. Bush holds the presidential record for fastest game ever played, clocking in at just under two hours for a full 18 holes. Bill Clinton was known for re-taking shots he wasn’t pleased with but loved the game so much that he would even play alone in the rain. Like his father, George W. Bush was a golf lover, but gave up playing in office after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Barack Obama had custom golf balls made, and his frequent tee times even made national headlines during his White House tenure.

Until Sunday, the golf course was a sort of safe escape, a sportsman’s retreat, for presidents — both in office and afterward. At least 17 U.S. presidents have been golfers, to varying degrees, and some of them played golf during the most fraught, contentious times in modern history, including World War I. But never before, as far as history recollects, had anyone attempted to assassinate a U.S. president on the golf course — not until Ryan Routh poked the muzzle of an automatic rifle through the chain link fence surrounding a West Palm Beach golf course and tried to find Donald Trump in his sights.

This is not to say, of course, that the golf course is some sacred, inviolate place; it is not. Nor are Sunday’s events merely indicative of the volatile lows that political discourse has reached in the Western world in the 21st century — after all, conservatives firmly believe that the political Left is a threat to essential rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and its machinations are responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions of unborn innocents on the horrifying altar of abortion. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris has not been shot in the side of the head, nobody has poked a rifle through the fence to take aim at President Joe Biden while he golfs — or, what is more likely, while he naps on the beach.

Some have said that Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh — the two men who have, thus far, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump — have been “radicalized.” This is most certainly true, but it is a far deeper, more complicated, and more sinister affair than political pundits and keyboard commentators may suggest. A 20-year-old student and a 58-year-old construction worker are not convinced to attempt murder because they read or hear or watch a few frightening news reports centered on a politician over a period of weeks, months, or even a few years. Were that the case, everyone who watches Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson would be hunting Washington’s elite, believing them to be brainwashed by demons. No, the foundation was laid years — even generations — prior to motivate everyday civilians to take a shot at the president.

There are three chief institutions which come into play in this ploy, and one which plays a supporting role: the education system, the media, the family, and the government. Over the past 60 years or more, the education system has been responsible for drilling into every child’s head the conclusion that Adolf Hitler was the most evil and inhuman creature to ever roam the face of the planet. Of course, Hitler was evil, and he wreaked war and atrocities upon the world, but he may not even be the most vile, despotic genocidal maniac of his day.

His one-time ally Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, is crediting with tens of millions of deaths. Whether in gulags or from famine or in unceremonious mass executions or even massacres in the streets during his many purges, Stalin racked up a body count roughly quadruple that of Adolf Hitler’s. Communist China’s Chairman Mao Zedong topped both Hitler and Stalin, the latter by almost 20 million deaths. Yet generation after generation has been taught, by an institution that they are practically forced to respect, that Adolf Hitler was the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth.

The media’s role, which is rightly noted as incessantly labeling Donald Trump as “Adolf Hitler” and his allies and supporters as “Nazis,” cannot be fulfilled unless the education system first fulfills its own role. In his apocalyptic novel “That Hideous Strength,” C.S. Lewis made the following observation regarding those who read newspapers:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

Thus, the education system not only teaches children which historical figure to consider the most depraved, the most evil, and the least human. The education system is also tasked with doing away with the “common man.” The sort of man who believes almost nothing written in the newspapers or reported on cable or network news programs, who “takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda,” must be “reconditioned.” His critical thinking skills, instead of being honed and sharpened, are dulled and allowed to atrophy. Subjects are taught to him by rote, his academic and intellectual value is judged on the basis of what he can remember and how closely it resembles the words of his textbook, not by his capacity for innovation or ingenuity. He is not taught to analyze subjects but to identify which analyses (conducted by others) are acceptable for him to read and regurgitate. He is taught the theory of “accreditation,” and learns to fear and abhor sources which are deemed un-credible.

Now, this process should be prevented and remedied by the third institution in our ensemble: the family. It ought to be the mother and father who, upon realizing that their child is especially dull and seemingly incapable of critical thinking, pull that child from the local school and either find a private, classical-based alternative or else just homeschool the child, seeing to his intellectual development and cultivation themselves. Thus, the family must be fractured. Feminism, pornography, and economic strife join forces to achieve this outcome, breaking up marriages and both encouraging and pressuring both mother and father to go out into the workforce, leaving them little time to recognize that their child is languishing intellectually and even less time to devote to rectifying that ill.

Christianity, which offers the antidote to the enemies of marriage, is shunned, mocked, and ridiculed in the public square, leaving fewer and fewer couples with any awareness that there even is an antidote to their marital struggles, much less what that antidote might be or where to find it.

Enter the media: Donald Trump is painted with a Hitler mustache on magazine covers, he is repeatedly compared to the German autocrat over a period of four, now eight, now 12 years, and every rhetorical stretch is employed, every argumentative gymnastic move put to use, to liken his policies and agenda to those of the Third Reich. Never mind that Donald Trump never rounded people up, tossed them in camps, and killed them. Never mind that Donald Trump has ended wars and conflicts, instead of beginning them. Never mind that Donald Trump’s political career did not begin with a failed and violent coup attempt. Never mind that Donald Trump never wrote a book detailing his racial ideology. Never mind that Donald Trump didn’t dissolve Congress upon taking office and declare himself the supreme leader of the country.

Donald Trump is further labeled a “threat to democracy,” a phrase repeated online by Routh, just a few months prior to pointing an AK-47 at the 45th president. This claim has been amplified and repeated ad infinitum by the left-wing political establishment in government and media. Again, never mind that Donald Trump left office in January 2021, even amidst credible claims of election fraud. Never mind that his policies in office included upholding and respecting the separation of powers, instead of packing or discrediting constitutional courts. Never mind that he was democratically elected in 2016 and not only ran for office again but earned even more votes in 2020. No, he’s literally Hitler, you have to believe us.

And the media is believed, because the media is “accredited,” it’s an acceptable source, and there are no critical thinking skills left to refute the overwhelming weight of that “accreditation.” This is only bolstered when those in the government, in the sitting presidential administration, condemn Donald Trump as Hitler and those who appreciate his policies and his patriotism as Nazis. These politicians are seen, by the likes of Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh, as Winston Churchill, boldly facing down the madman threatening the world, when in fact, ironically, they are more like Joseph Goebbels, pushing dehumanizing propaganda at every turn.

Ultimately, that’s what is behind the assassination attempts against Donald Trump: dehumanization. This machine consisting of the education system, the media, and the government operates on the principle that those who oppose its agenda — even those who simply do not accept it — are unfit to be called human. Again, ironically, this is alarmingly similar to Hitler’s own ideology, to his mythological Aryan ideal: all those who do not fit in are simply declared sub-human and eliminated. The radicalization of would-be assassins — not to mention the unprecedented lawfare campaign targeting Donald Trump — would also seem to fall under the purview of threatening democracy.

Donald Trump not only opposes the ideology of the diabolical elites — unlimited immigration from the third world, the destruction of America’s heritage and history, the economic oppression of every American family working hard to make a home — but is an existential threat to it. He must, therefore, be eliminated. After all, the elites will argue, he’s less than human. He’s a threat to democracy, he’s literally Hitler.