First, unfunny comedian Kathy Griffin cravenly sought publicity for her failing career by releasing a photo of her holding a bloody severed head that looked like President Trump.
Then, some mediocre actors put on a Shakespeare in the park play that featured a Trump-lookalike being brutally murdered, completely with copious blood.
And then, perhaps not unsurprisingly, a crazed liberal went on a shooting spree at a baseball practice attended by top Republicans, greiviously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise.
Of course, all those stories came and went in the mainstream media, although the shooting did bring a moment of quiet reflection, with both sides urging that the heated rhetoric be toned down.
But that didn’t last long.
And now, the vicious Chris Matthews has used his MSNBC soapbox to suggest that maybe Trump should murder his son in law, Jared Kushner.
Matthews appeared on his show with two guests, The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and the New York Times’ Frank Bruni. At one point there was this exchange:
MATTHEWS: Is it a royal family instead of a Democratic or a Republican form of government? Or is it a family running the government? Is it Ivanka and Jared and the President sitting around in the White House upstairs ruling the world?
PARKER: I don’t think it’s quite that but I think it is run like a family business. The president and his aides see it publicly and privately and the President’s family, his children, especially his daughter Ivanka and, you know, Jared Kushner, they operate with a degree of impunity that does not exist for these other aides. So, if you look at just Jared and Tillerson, Jared basically emerged as a shadow Secretary of State. You mentioned peace in the Middle East. His portfolio includes not only that, it includes China, it includes Mexico, it includes Canada and that’s just on the foreign policy front. So, if you’re the secretary of state, ambassadors and leaders of foreign nations know that they can directly go to the President’s son-in-law and have his ear that deeply undermines you and makes it really difficult for you to do your job.
MATTHEWS: And then you find out in all these investigations that Jared was opening up a tunnel to Moscow so he wouldn’t have to deal with the State Department. So the son-in-law — you know, one good thing Mussolini did was execute his son-in-law. I mean, I’m talking about Ciano —
FRANK BRUNI: Let’s be careful here, yeah.
MATTHEWS: That was an extreme measure. But this was — this is a strange situation.
At another point, Matthews compared Trump communist Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam and said that Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump are just like the sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay — both brutal murderers.
“You put Uday and Qusay in your government and you’re going to have a problem with everybody else in the government because nobody can fight with them. Nobody can challenge them and, in the end, the son-in-law is always right because he can always to go his father-in-law or his wife and say they were mean to me,” Matthews said.
So, yeah, the same hateful and vicious rhetoric is back, right where it often emanates from — MSNBC.