Well if you don’t like a president, the last thing you want is them to be assassinated. Then you never are free from them...

that is a good point. reagan lived and he still got a cult, but it would have been worse if he'd been martyred.

Huh? The former Confederacy made out like bandits thanks to Lincoln's assassination.

Martyrdom is only effective if it's ineffective nobodies getting killed.


Like Ashley Babbit.

As if the cult of trump wouldn't be 1000% supercharged if he'd been killed

As opposed to the election of '84, the biggest blowout in history and the biggest resurgence of conservatism in over half a century?

Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow flourished thanks to Lincoln's assassination.

Progressive causes died after the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Peaceful progress for civil rights were derailed after King's assassination.

The Black Panthers were decapitated by a leadership assassination campaign.

Assassinations sadly work. It's only the ineffective fodder who make useful martyrs. It's the difference between the death of Hitler and the death of Horst Wessel. Would anyone honestly make the argument that Nazism would have swept over Germany FASTER if Hitler had been assassinated in 1930?

Those are good points.

The main observation that comes to mind is that those examples are all of assassinations of progressive leaders by repressive elements of society. (All the non-hypothetical examples are, anyway.)

Admittedly, my prejudice is that random right-wing folks would react differently (read: more wide-ranging violence) than random left-wing folks. But both sides can mobilize, as we've seen. BUT since the existing power structure (read: the plutocrats) would be among those upset, I think such unrest would be fanned rather than quashed. (Exhibit A: Official response to BLM vs 1/6.)

I am not enough of a historian to speculate whether Hitler's shoes would have been filled if a time traveler had killed him. But my understanding is that, like Trump, Hitler was surrounded by (frequently frustrated) handlers as he rose to power. We'd all be worse off if Trump's ego had allowed him to listen to his handlers from time to time, and for all I know Hitler Jr. would have been an even more efficient fascist than what the world got.