It's taken a couple of days for the dust to begin to settle from the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life this summer. With luck, lessons have been learned in terms of just how much Secret Service coverage Trump requires and what additional security procedures need to be in place. The attempt made by Ryan Routh was somewhat clumsy at best and he didn't come anywhere near as close to succeeding as Stephen Crooks did, for which we can be thankful. Such thoughts were not the primary focus of the analysis being conducted by some of the talking heads at CNN, however. One regular contributor, Juliette Kayyem of the Boston Globe and other outlets had larger concerns on her mind this week. She is alarmed by the multiple attempts on Trump's life, but not because a leading candidate for the presidency might have their campaign suddenly and unceremoniously ended by a bullet, but because she fears that repeated attempts to kill Trump might build sympathy for him among the public and improve his chances of winning. (Daily Wire)

CNN’s Juliette Kayyem lamented the possibility that former President Donald Trump could benefit politically after a second assassination attempt over the weekend, calling the situation a “problem” and “unfortunate.”

Authorities arrested 58-year-old Ryan Routh — a Democrat donor with a criminal history — after Secret Service noticed his AK-47-style rifle as he hid in shrubbery only a few hundred yards away from Trump at Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach. When he was engaged by federal law enforcement officials, he ran and got into a car and drove off. A witness captured a photo of the car and the license plate, allowing police to quickly locate and arrest him.

“And I really don’t care what you feel about him, or Harris,” she said on the network late on Sunday. “I mean, this is, this is the expectation that he will be safe.”

You can watch the brief clip of the exchange in question in the embedded tweet below. You'll want to have the volume on because the transcript simply doesn't do it justice. In fact, Kayyem's answer is such a muddled mess that I wasn't entirely sure what she was attempting to say until I'd heard it a few times.

CNN's Juliette Kayyem laments this second Trump assassination attempt "could have impacted voters" and "will be used for political purposes" and that's "exceptionally unfortunate" pic.twitter.com/ymJKE3VbUZ

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 16, 2024

It's almost painful to watch Juliette Kayyem muddle through this answer as the other panelists do nothing to jump in and toss her a lifeline. It's as if they can tell that the broadcast vehicle is about to go over the edge of a cliff and there's not much they can do in response. 

Kayyem hems and haws a bit at first, describing the attempts on Trump's life as "a safety issue," suggesting that safety issues shouldn't be distracting voters from the policy issues of the day. (Or more obviously, from the need to demonize Donald Trump as much as humanly possible.) Toward the end of her commentary, she appears to realize that she still hasn't made her point, however. That's when she expresses her fears that attempted assassinations threatening to take Trump out "could be used as either a sword or a shield" in the political arena.

You see, if Donald Trump were allowed to use the fact that his whackjob haters on the left have literally been trying to murder him during the final weeks of the campaign as a talking point of some sort, that would be "unfortunate." Looked at in a vacuum, Kayyem's comments would be repulsive at best. But it's difficult to deny that all she was really doing was saying the quiet part aloud. It had to be a bitter pill to swallow when Kamala Harris was forced to release public statements condemning the assassination attempts and expressing "gratitude" that Donald Trump had emerged largely unscathed from the second attack. 

But how much have the attacks really moved the needle? Trump saw a relatively tiny bump after the first attack, but that could have been part of the normal ebb and flow of the weekly polling cycle. Of course, in a race this close, a tiny bump could wind up making all the difference in some of the critical swing states, so perhaps CNN and the rest of the liberal legacy media have valid worries on this score. But it's still a tawdry display no matter how you parse it. Unfortunately, it's all too typical of national politics in 2024. This... Is... CNN.