They Said ‘Punch Him’—Now It’s Bullets: The Dangerous Escalation No One Wants to Admit, by Victor Davis Hanson

By Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Contributor, The Daily Signal, April 27, 2026

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, hosting a podcast and producing video commentaries four times per week, and writing a weekly column.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.opens in a new tab

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

We have had the third attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, where shots were exchanged within two years, recently at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., last Saturday evening. No president in U.S. history has been the object, the target, of three assassination attempts in which shots were fired by either law enforcement or the shooter himself.

And yet Trump—this is the third time.

So, we’ve had Cole Tomas Allen. We had Ryan Routh, remember, in Palm Beach, and we had Thomas Crooks on the roof in Butler. We also had a young man—Jonathan Oddi—and he was the person who tried to break into Mar‑a‑Lago and kill Trump, and he was killed himself by law enforcement. …