Johnny Depp, the actor, best known for playing Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the caribbean” films, just imagined a new role, if not for himself then maybe some other actor, that being a presidential assassin. He asked a crowd at Glastonbury 2017 music and arts festival, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” then he seemed to backtrack from the implication is a rambling, confused speech in which he claimed not to be an actor.
Celebrities imagining violence because of Donald Trump
Depp was the latest celebrity who believed violence because of the election of President Donald Trump.
They range from Madonna suggesting that she would like to blow up the White House to Robert De Niro wanted to punch the president in the face. Let us also not forget Kathy Griffin with her severed head stunt and the nightly stabbing to death of POTUS during a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”
The last time an actor assassinated a president
For those readers who are history-challenged, John Wilkes Booth was the last actor who assassinated a president when he entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. Then he leaped down to the stage, shouted, “Sic Semper Tyrannous!” and hobbled off on his broken leg. Booth was run down and killed by a party of soldiers several days later and died a miserable death in a barn.
Presidential assassinations never turn out well
The death of Lincoln, for instance, was a particular tragedy. Perhaps, had he lived, he would have been able to navigate the two opposing imperatives to integrate the South back into the Union and protect the rights of newly liberated African Americans. It is possible that Reconstruction, under Lincoln, would have avoided a century of Jim Crow and all of the evils that were inherent in that system.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy ushered in an era of paranoia, conspiracy mongering, and political trench warfare that has lasted until the current era. Liberalism, through overreach and meanness, morphed from the optimistic, new frontier ideology of the Kennedy years into a hate cult that, among other things, causes actors to imagine how wonderful it would be if a sitting president were to take a bullet.
The assassination of Donald Trump would not usher in a new progressive era with people dancing in the streets singing, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty we’re free at last!” Such an event would cause a political and cultural backlash the dimensions of which cannot be evaluated. The death of Trump would also make Mike Pence president, a nightmare that the left should not want to wish for.
