Donald Trump has now survived more assassination attempts than any other U.S. president. He isn't the only one in the crosshairs of political extremists who think violence is the answer.

“Would you go back in time to assassinate Adolph Hitler?”

It’s a thought-experiment question frequently asked during forums and online discussion boards.

“Wouldn’t that be the most moral course of action for a time traveller?”

It’s the framework for this particular thought experiment, the basic premise. In a situation like that, the time traveller would, presumably, know what Hitler turned out to be. They would know the cost to humanity. The horrors of the Holocaust, which can be neither forgotten nor forgiven. It was arguably the greatest war crime perpetrated on humanity since we began keeping records.

Millions of Jewish people, dead. Innocent men, women, and children. Entire families snuffed out, generational lines ended forever. 

It’s abhorrent. It’s unimaginable. It was a crime against humanity so heinous, the world hopes never to see its like again.

So, the time traveller in our thought experiment, given these horrors, would be almost morally bound to do what would otherwise be unthinkable (thankfully) to the vast majority of us, wouldn’t they?

To knowingly, and with malice of forethought, take a human life through violence: Murder.

Does anything, would anything, can anything justify committing murder?

By the tenets of the thought experiment “Would a time traveller be honor-bound to assassinate Adolf Hitler?” the answer is often, for many people, yes. 

But it’s the wrong answer. Because it’s the wrong question.

The real question would-be moral absolutists don’t ask is the question that matters most: “Would assassinating Adolf Hitler have achieved anything?”

By “anything”, we mean: Would assassinating Adolf Hitler have A.) prevented the Holocaust or B.) prevented World War II?

The answer is probably not.

Assassinating Adolf Hitler might have prevented the Holocaust and World War II —  if Hitler had acted alone and in a vacuum.

But he didn’t.

Absent Hitler, there were and would have been other architects of the war and the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler had a cadre of like-minded leaders who were almost as strong and influential as he was.

Remove Hitler from the equation, almost nothing changes. Sure, cutting off the head of a snake kills the snake, but the German Reich wasn’t a snake. The German government wasn’t run by one single, evil person who dragged the nation into a war of conquest that included the eradication of millions of people.

Adolf Hitler was the face of the organization, but it had other faces. Other culprits.

After a trip back through time to assassinate Adolf Hitler, our hypothetical time traveller would have returned to a future in which it was instead Ernst Röhm who organized the death camps. Or Gregor Strasser. Or Hermann Göring. Or Joseph Goebbels.

Or any of a dozen other individuals elevated during the reign of terror foisted on the world by the Third Reich.

Remove Hitler and all the other conditions would remain: Germany’s post-WWI poverty and devastation; the rising climate of antisemitism that infested many European nations during the 1940’s; the radicalization of a generation of young Germans who chafed at the post-WWI punishments borne by Germany.

Hitler is a convenient focal point because he is such a visible and high-profile historical figure. He has been portrayed and displayed by Hollywood movies for seven decades to great effect. He is, in many ways, the perfect boogeyman. And he was evil. Of course he was.

He was responsible for the death of millions of people.

But he didn’t act alone.

The leadership echelons of the Third Reich and Nazi Germany, dozens of individuals, their various histories, motivations, and roles, doesn’t fit as neatly into a movie narrative. Nuance doesn’t make for great cinema.

Nuance is for real life.

And in real life, a time traveller who managed to assassinate Hitler would have done nothing to magically stop World War II or prevent the Holocaust.

All the conditions which produced a leader like Adolf Hitler and a political party like the Nazis would still have existed. And someone else would have taken Hitler’s place as the face and loudspeaker of the Third Reich.

To stop World War II and the Holocaust, the time traveller would have to fix the underlying causes that contributed to Hitler’s rise. And a team of historians and experts would be hard-pressed to agree as to how to do that, even today, with the benefit of hindsight and everything we know about Nazi power and influence in Germany.

Assassinating Hitler might have changed the timetable, the internal leadership, the propaganda style, and perhaps the exact form of the Holocaust and World War II. But it would not have removed the ingredients: German humiliation after World War I, fear of communism, hatred of the Weimar Republic, conspiracy thinking, paramilitary violence, racial antisemitism, and elite willingness to gamble with extremists.

The “kill Hitler” theory can be a little too comforting. It imagines evil as a single removable tumor, when in reality the disease had already spread through parties, newspapers, courts, police structures, street militias, donors, bureaucrats, generals, academics, churches, and ordinary voters.

Likewise, go back in time and prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and World War II would have broken out somewhere else.

Another assassination, bombing, border incident, intelligence scandal, nationalist plot, or crackdown would have created a different flashpoint. All the conditions were ripe for it. Vienna’s hawks did not need that exact dead archduke. They needed a pretext.

Sooner or later, they would have found one.

Violence might have broken out over some ugly incident in Albania. Or Macedonia. Or a half-dozen other powder kegs in existance at the time. All the conditions were right for a global conflagration. 

To truly fix any of these things, a time-traveller would have to fix the underlying causes. And since we can’t even prevent wars right now, or predict what underlying causes today might lead to war later, the question is not only pointless but moot.

To fix war, mass violence, discrimination, othering, we’d have to fix ourselves. Humanity doesn’t seem to be great at that.

And we aren’t God. We aren’t all-knowing or omniscient. We can’t see the future. 

The well-meaning time-traveller who assassinated Adolf Hitler might have succeeded in hastening World War II. More people might have been killed during the Holocaust.

One of Hitler’s would-be replacements might have ultimately succeeded where Adolf Hitler (blessedly for all of us) fell short.

And yet, some people still want to play God.

Media outlets trying to improve ratings, politicians trying to improve their election chances, and other purveyors of over-heated political rhetoric have spent the better part of the last decade casting Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler.

Some impressionable hyper-partisans in our highly polarized society obviously believe it. And as such, some have deputized themselves as defenders of democracy and the greater good. They are taking it upon themselves to assassinate Donald Trump.

At the White House Correspondent’s dinner on Saturday, a gunman was prevented from carrying out the terrible deed.

This marks the third time someone has come close to achieving this goal. Donald Trump has now survived more assassination attempts that any president in U.S. history.

Policy disagreements between political parties used to be an acceptable part of a living in a representative democracy. Donald Trump, whatever his political opponents make think or say, is usually guilty of nothing more than enforcing existing U.S. laws.

Progressives might not agree with U.S. laws regarding immigration enforcement, for instance. But they are laws. We all voted for our representatives. We the People passed these laws. If someone doesn’t like the law, fine.

Change it.

But conservative voters weren’t trying to assassinate former President Joe Biden because he was refusing to enforce the law. No one tried to kill him for allowing 15 million undocumented immigrants to flow over the U.S. border with no plan whatsoever as to how the U.S. would care for all of them. No path to citizenship or permanent residency. No plan whatever.

No one tried to kill President Biden after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Not even after the Abbey Gate attack, nor the retaliatory strike in which the Biden Administration bombed a humanitarian aid worker and their entire family.

Why would they?

Joe Biden wasn’t responsible for those things. He was part of a wider organization of people who were responsible, just as Donald Trump is.

The right has plenty of reasons to detest the policies of the left; and vice versa. But pretending one boogeyman, one scapegoat, one villain is responsible for “destroying democracy” or any other such hyperbolic nonsense, is, at best, reductive, one dimension, short-sighted.

It is also extremely childish.

No conservative thinks elimiating one person from the progressive bench would be enough to end policies and laws they don’t agree with.

Why do progressives believe this?

Donald Trump is nothing more, nor less, than a conservative politician. There are a thousand more just like him, who think exactly as he does. In fact, Trump isn’t really all that conservative. There are plenty of Republicans who are, by progressive standards, much further right than Donald Trump.

One such person might be Vice President J.D. Vance. House Speaker Mike Johnson. But there are plenty more where they came from.

In fact, Donald Trump received 77,302,580 votes in the 2024 presidential election, according to the official Federal Election Commission results. That was 49.8% of the national popular vote.

If something happens to Trump, those voters aren’t going to suddenly become progressive.

What is the plan of these would-be assassins who keep attempting to remove Donald Trump by any means nessecary?

To kill Trump and every person who might replace him?

Everyone who voted for him?

And for those who think that political violence is, sometimes, justified, be it against Trump or the executive of a healthcare company: Where will you be when the bombings start? 

Assassins don’t stop with assassinations. A society which tolerates such things, or worse, excuses, encourages, and even lionizes it, will eventually reap the whirlwind of more and more extreme forms of violence as these tactics continue to fail to bring about the desired result.

The assassin missed Donald Trump last night. They also missed the many journalists who were attending the event, plus innocent bystanders, police officers, hotel staff members. 

Bullets don’t have names on them.

For some, maybe its easy to excuse violence against someone else, someone you hate. But violence begets violence.

Next time, the violence might hit much closer to home.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)