What are liberals going to say for themselves if Donald Trump gets assassinated?

That’s a question worth pondering as a new effort is under way to delegitimize The Donald in the wake of his remarks on the Second Amendment.

Leftists are accusing Trump of trying to incite an attack on Hillary Clinton from “Second Amendment people.” They have been using such intemperate language that it wouldn’t be surprising if someone took a shot at The Donald. (Feds suspect a British national tried to do so at a rally in June after attempting to grab a police officer’s gun to carry out the assassination.)

Scott Adams, famed cartoonist of Dilbert, had already been mocking Clinton for pairing “the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.”

The incitement got so bad that Adams, in a satire on blog.dilbert.com, “endorsed” Clinton. He did so, he explained, “for my personal safety.” Quoth he: “My safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”

It’s no joke, to judge by the newswires. This week in Bloomfield, NJ, police reported that a man was assaulted with a crowbar for, as the Drudge Report headlined it, wearing a Donald Trump shirt.

In the latest brouhaha, Trump tried to mark the difference between Clinton and himself in respect of the Bill of Rights command that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Trump, like all GOP candidates for president, is for strict obedience to the Second Amendment, which has been called the palladium of our liberty. He’s allied himself with — and been endorsed by — the National Rifle Association.

Hillary Clinton is the opposite. She favors the radical regulation of guns. Not once has she ever protested against the fact that in much of the state she served as senator — New York — the Second Amendment might as well not exist.

This is the point Trump was making when, in Wilmington, NC, he warned that Clinton wants to “essentially abolish the Second Amendment.” And that “if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.”

“Although,” Trump quickly added, “the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied [with four justices appointed by each party]. You see what’s going on.”

The Democrats immediately jumped on this. “Trump Suggests Gun Owners Act Against Clinton” is the headline the New York Times put over its Page One lead story, suggesting he was inciting gun-rights supporters to take matters into their own hands.

Democrats use this kind of talk to avoid discussing the merits of the Second Amendment. They are stuck with a leaked recording that captures Clinton saying the Supreme Court is “wrong” on the Second Amendment.

That was a reference to the court’s landmark ruling called Heller. It held that the Second Amendment protects not just a militia but an individual right to keep and bear arms. It forced Washington, DC, to give a gun permit to a retired security guard, Dick Heller.

In May, a Washington Post blogger, Eugene Volokh, called Clinton’s comments a “smoking gun” confirming Trump’s early warnings that Clinton was coming after Americans’ guns.

Instead of a reasoned debate on guns, though, the Democrats have offered only ad hominem attacks on Trump. This is the argument that he’s racist, unstable and inherently unfit to be president.

Clinton has been making this argument, as has President Obama, to a degree unsurpassed by his predecessors. But it will be a frosty Friday before anyone descends to the kind of incitement being issued daily by the New York Times.

Its foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman, goes so far this week as to liken Trump’s remarks to the kind of talk that Israel’s leftists insist got Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. “His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him,” Friedman writes (libeling, by the way, many decent Israeli and American critics of Rabin’s peace drive).

“Forget politics,” the Timesman says of Trump. “He is a disgusting human being. His children should be ashamed of him. I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land — unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.”

What in the world could he mean by that?