They don’t whisper, they blurt it out. But the public whisper carries into the private mind of the unhinged, and then you get Butler, Palm Springs, and the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Jimmy Kimmel’s only the most prominent, and of-the-moment of the whisperers. A performer caught in a firestorm, whose topical presentation veers between unmanned tears at the defeats of his politics and the snide hate of a man whose wife reportedly helps craft his ideological rhetoric.
Kyle Gass, is the only whisperer on this list who lost a fan in me. I covered Tenacious D’s Portland show a few years back because I loved the act, a post-Spinal Tap send up of the heavy rock and metal biz—a genre ripe for mockumentary treatment. Then, after Butler, Gass stepped in it, whispering assassination in front of a packed house. The insurance company contracted to cover the tour backed out. Sad for Jack Black, who undoubtedly shares Gass’ sentiments about Trump, but has sense enough to keep his mouth shut.
Snoop Dogg is an inarticulate gangster who rose to prominence in an era that made Black music immensely popular while fundamentally degrading the culture it portrays. With his big carnival pistol—an unlucky symbol of the crisis of Black culture in America—expelling an effigy of President Trump’s face. Subsequently, Snoop claimed to “respect” the President. Why? Trump commuted the sentence of a gangster rap mogul.
Johnny Depp, who played Sweeny Todd to perfection, perfecting his own talent for implication with a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and a surmise on the desirably for another assassination. It’s a way of shitting the bed in the eyes of half of the body politic—ironic in light of the subsequent Amber Heard revelations.
“Comedian” Kathy Griffin, standing like a Hollywood avenger with Trump’s decapitated head, held by the hair, blood at the neck. Then sniveling like a snot-nosed debutante when the thermometer got hot. She whispered into the abyss to all the obscure deranged, killed her career and passed the “torch.”
The list of celebrities who, unasked, declare their hatred for Trump and Republicans is long—Springsteen, Fonda, the dethroned Colbert come to mind—and that’s their right. The assassination whisperers list is more exclusive. To get on that list, you must be explicit. You must reference in a discernible way (oblique can work, as Depp showed) the desirability of a violent death for our current president.
In the wilds of the American psyche, there are hundreds of thousands of individuals demented enough to contemplate political assassination. Social media is an accomplice—giving every abyss-dweller a platform. Elected officials weigh in, with Nazi allusions, a shellacked left-wing shouting their chief policy position, Trump hate, from the rooftops. The “legacy” media, irrevocably deserted by masses for inextricable bias and hate. Swaths of academia, absent credibility even before they open their mouths.
Leaving aside conspiracy theories, and concerns about the competence of the people charged with protecting Trump, we look at the hayfields, the golf courses, the hotel conference rooms where everything goes wrong. Into the minds of those who dangerously process the assassination whispers, and act.