Literally it would seem, rather than the well known expression.

We found that nearly one-third of Americans surveyed—and around half of those identifying as left-of-center—believe that the murder of certain public figures is at least somewhat justified. The figures are startling: 38 percent of respondents, and 55 percent of those left of center, said assassinating President Trump would be at least somewhat justified; 31 percent of respondents, and 48 percent of those left of center, said the same about Musk
…
Our report also discovered an online “assassination culture,” found in predominantly left-leaning digital spaces, such as Bluesky and Reddit. This subculture justifies and glorifies political violence. Some of these networks’ users wield the name “Luigi” or use the Luigi video game character as coded endorsements of Brian Thompson’s alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione. These users cloak explicit calls for violence in stylized memes. Many believe that political murder and sabotage are acceptable forms of protest.

This was already becoming known in 2022 (Aborted Assassinations) via the survey presented in the graph above, but it seems to have accelerated since Trump’s election to a second term in 2024. Witness the following:

  • Luigi Mangione
    The Emerson College poll found 41% of voters ages 18 to 29 saw Thompson’s murder as “acceptable,” while just 40% found it somewhat or completely “unacceptable.”…
    Plus his social media groupies.
  • Karmelo Anthony
    Karmelo Anthony confessed to stabbing and killing Austin Metcalf after an altercation at an athletic event. According to witnesses, Anthony came into Metcalf’s tent and refused to leave when requested. Anthony then “dared” someone to touch him. When Metcalf attempted to escort him out of the tent, he was stabbed to death.…
    As of April 30, 2025, Karmelo Anthony’s GiveSendGo fundraiser had raised more than $515,000 
  • Rodney Hinton, Jr.
    A black man from Ohio, reportedly ran down a retired white police officer who was directing traffic for a college graduation—and Hinton has garnered generous support, both from the black community and the left….Prosecutors allege a “calculated and premeditated” motive: just prior to Hinton running Henderson down, Hinton had watched bodycam footage from an officer-involved shooting in which Hinton’s own son, 18-year-old Ryan, was killed. Ryan had been caught up in a foot-pursuit police chase after officers were investigating reports of a stolen vehicle (the one in which Ryan, and three others, were sitting) and when the group was approached by law enforcement, Ryan ran and hid. When officers closed in, Ryan jumped out, brandishing a gun.…
    His fundraising has so far only amounted to some $83,000, but he’s still racked up a lot of online support

Don’t think this is just confined to the Left in the USA. Here’s a comment recently left on Chris Trotter’s new substack site by a frequent Standard commentator, one “Kumara Republic”:

In the words of “cockney economist” Gary Stevenson: “Tax work less, tax wealth more”. Or as others would put it, “tax the rich now so that we don’t have to eat them later”. The latter has already started happening with Luigi Mangione’s killing of a health insurance CEO in the US.

Recently my wife had an encounter at smallish party with a woman who muttered sotto voce that there were some assassinations she wished had succeeded, clearly referring to Trump in the context of a general conversation about US politics. The woman is soft-spoken and kind with a PhD in psychiatry, but then education is no longer harbour of civilised behaviour:

None of this is helped by the authorities pretending otherwise, as yet another shameful report on the FBI dropped the other day, where the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence excoriated the FBI for mislabeling Hodgkinson’s firing of 70 rounds at Republican Congressmen in 2017 as an instance of “suicide by cop.”:

That claim never made any sense. Hodgkinson lived in Illinois, and if his overriding objective had been suicide, he didn’t need to drive to Washington, D.C. They have cops in Illinois. He didn’t need to case out the park where the Republican baseball team practiced for two months before launching his attack. He didn’t need to fire 70 rounds, and he probably would have waited until there were uniformed officers present before opening fire.

What was also revealed was that the FBI made this bullshit claim even as they recovered notes from Hodgkinson’s body where he had handwritten the names, physical descriptions and office addresses of six Republican Congressmen – obviously reflecting a political motive and not a mere suicidal intent:

I always assumed that the FBI didn’t fool anyone. Hodgkinson’s political motivation was obvious. He was a campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” (Group members hailed his assassination attempt, which gravely wounded Steve Scalise among others, with “one, two, three shots you’re out at the old ball game!!!”) He verified with a bystander that the team on the field were Republicans before opening fire.

Four years later in 2021 the FBI did re-classify the shooting as domestic terrorism but never explained why, any more than they ever explained why they made their original claim. Powerline makes the obvious connection, based on the things he believed about the GOP, going back to the days of Reagan:

While Hodgkinson’s actions were obviously extreme, his political ideology was not. Rather, he was a garden-variety, mainstream Democratic Party volunteer….What is striking about these political views is their banality. Every one of them is a typical Democratic Party talking point of the time. Hodgkinson was faithfully parroting what he heard his idol, Bernie Sanders, say, along with just about every other elected Democrat. I suspect that this is what made the FBI uncomfortable. It was not some exotic, alien, extremist ideology that led James (“Tom”) Hodgkinson to try to murder the Republican baseball team. Rather, it was the familiar anti-Republican hyperbole of the Democratic Party. This may have struck a little too close to home for the Bureau to want to publicize.

And those Democrat Party talking points themselves are now far more extreme than have ever been heard before, across a range of issues.