When the name of a prominent conservative politician came up in conversation a few years ago, a newspaper colleague of mine immediately spouted, “Oh, I hate her!”

When asked why, she thought for more than a moment. “I don’t know,” was the embarrassed reply.

Such mindless malice is precisely what hateful rhetoric is intended to create, especially when spewed by cynically devious political opportunists whose bile reverberates through a liberal echo chamber.

And no one in human history has been the subject of more malicious mass indoctrination than Donald J. Trump.

This is an America-loving successful businessman who donated his salary during a prosperous and peaceful first presidency – and who has willfully subjected himself and his family to an unprecedented hellstorm from the leftist elite in seeking a second term.

He’s been framed as a Russian collaborator (when it was Hillary Clinton and her Democrat colleagues who actually did the collaborating), and then was probed endlessly and fruitlessly in a multimillion-dollar investigation stoked by political rivals who knew it to be a complete sham.

After now, in campaigning for a second term, he’s inexplicably become Public Enemy No. 1, facing more charges and lawsuits than the Unabomber.

The left’s malignant fictions

As all those brickbats bounce off him, his jaundiced political rivals resort to wild, intangible phantasms that he’s suddenly become the threat to democracy that they are.

Pray, tell me again: Who’s trying to remove a political rival from the ballot so people can’t vote for him? Who’s trying to imprison their political rival and his supporters and other dissidents? Who’s sending in a legion of armed federal agents to raid and rifle through a political rival’s home for documents they already knew were there, making sure to comb through the family’s sock drawers for whatever they might find?

Meanwhile, the left’s frothy liberal lap dogs drool their gummy drool, dutifully, barking and amplifying the malignant fictions incessantly and insidiously. The leftist New Republic, a perversely named oily rag, featured a June cover of Trump ominously morphed into Hitler, with the headline “American fascism – What It Would Look Like.”

Why would anyone be surprised, then, that such a relentless tsunami of character assassination might lead to the real thing?

“The Trump Gunman Fired the Rifle, the Left Loaded the Gun,” warns a headline at RedState.com. Yep.

Indeed, the seeds of Saturday’s assassination attempt have been germinating for years in the steaming compost of the left’s bacteria-ridden rhetoric.

Just months into what would become a booming pre-pandemic Trump term, “comedienne” Kathy Griffin posted a ghastly photo of her holding what was made to resemble Trump’s bloody severed head. She was, mercifully for the rest of us, unceremoniously dumped even by the likes of CNN.

Even earlier, as the Bible Trump swore on at his inauguration was still cooling from his touch, rapper Snoop Dogg filmed a mock assassination of “Ronald Klump,” which Newsweek described as “a clown representing U.S. President Donald Trump.” Nice – especially since Mr. Trump had barely had a chance to learn where the extra closet space is at the White House, much less tackle policy.

They never gave him a chance. Dogg and Griffin, in particular, must have taken extra spins through the automatic brainwash. Yet, the rapper never paid much of a price, came out clean on the other side, and is still foisted upon us by the left-wing culture.

Through the Russia wringer

And, of course, the rinse-and-repeat Russia con and all the other fabrications on the left’s brittle papyrus cheat sheet have only added reeking manure to the pile of dung flung at this man.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, no big fan of Trump, said the left’s 24/7 character assassination was likely to lead to a real assassination attempt. Archdukes have been killed for less.

“When someone is demonized to the extent that Trump was being demonized,” Barr says, “you’re putting a target on them. And you’re increasing the risk that they are going to become a target.

“What was bothering me was that the thrust of the Democratic narrative for this election year had become that Trump was a mortal danger to our democracy, and if he wins the country’s going away. That is an apocalyptic and hysterical position that’s bound to lead to violence eventually.

“Combine that with the personal demonization …”

The left has inarguably conjured up the perilous political climate change you saw on Saturday, enough to inspire would-be assassins. Kind of like the “man with a clear hatred for Republicans” who perpetrated a mass shooting at the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game for Charity — yes, just months after Trump’s inauguration.

We are reaping what the left has sowed for so long.