Trump Shooting's The Living History We Don't Need To Experience
Defeating evil demands the boldness to name it.
Did the world end on Saturday? It felt like it might have. Perhaps that’s too pessimistic a response to Donald Trump’s attempted assassination, but history might argue otherwise. A mainstream media and a political system already ill equipped to cope with the insurrectionist-in-chief has buckled further in the shooting’s aftermath. A bullet clipped Trump in the ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, leaving the former president, adjudicated rapist, and convicted felon “bloodied, defiant [with] that traditional fist-pump that Donald Trump is known for,” according to Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, who sounded like she was narrating his campaign ad.
The image of the Secret Service rushing an injured Trump off the stage as he raises in fist in triumph after having defied death, the U.S. flag in the background, will soon appear on t-shirts and Trump’s campaign merch. The Daily Beast claimed that “Trump Just Created One of the Most Iconic Photos in U.S. History.” World Editor Nico Hines wrote, “Trump may have survived an assassination attempt by a single inch Saturday night. His instant reaction was a stunning testament to the fighting spirit that half the country loves.” Sharing the same photo, Politico said, “Trump’s Raised Fist Will Make History — And Define His Candidacy.” Never Trumper Kate Andrews at the Spectator declared, “Today, we are all MAGA.” (We most certainly are not). Shaun Harper, a supposed DEI expert at Forbes, wondered, “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters?” (The article was later pulled but Internet shame is forever.)
Black voters like myself aren’t so sure we’ll survive the gunfire from another Trump presidency.
Turning down the temperature or unconditional surrender?
“Violence does in truth recoil upon the violent,” Sherlock Holmes observed, “and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”
Trump has consistently promoted political violence. He was likely in the process of doing so when he was shot. He refers to his political enemies as “human scum," and he repeatedly dehumanizes undocumented immigrants: “I don’t know if you call them people … in some cases they’re not people, in my opinion.”
Trump mocked the vicious beating of 82-year-old Paul Pelosi: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” He joked about the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He laughed about MAGA goons harassing Sen. Mitt Romney at an airport prior to January 6. And, of course, he openly incited an attack against Congress on January 6. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy begged Trump for help as his goons stormed the Capitol, Trump simply said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
During the 2016 campaign 1,000 years ago, Trump warned his supporters that if Hillary Clinton was able to nominate Supreme Court justices, there was nothing they could do: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” (It’s literally impossible to read that as anything but a call for violence.)
Trump is hardly a man a peace. He’s also a fierce defender of the weapon that almost took his life. He promised NRA members this year that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he’s president again. There’s little chance that his brush with death will humble him. There’s nothing on earth that he won’t exploit for his own personal gain, including an assassination attempt that killed 50-year-old rally attendee Corey Comperatore.
I don’t believe Trump deserved the violent fate he’s long courted, and I’m certain the nation doesn’t deserve the shooting’s inevitable aftermath. Before the gunman was identified and we knew anything about his motive, Republicans were quick to blame Democrats, suggesting that simply acknowledging the stakes of this election, as well as Trump’s actual character, is itself an incitement of violence.
“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, himself a victim of political violence. “Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”
J.D. Vance, an Internet troll posing as a sitting U.S. senator, immediately posted on social media, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
This is fundamentally untrue on many levels. President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leadership have all repeatedly and clearly defined “stopping” Trump as defeating him at the ballot box. Republicans are the ones who openly promote violence, calling for “trial by combat” or invoking 1776 and secessionist imagery.
Vance could possibly become the next vice president of the United States. He’s a shameless opportunist, and we shouldn’t assume that this incident would’ve changed him. It simply offered another opportunity. It goes without saying but J.D. Vance isn’t Robert Kennedy, who broke the news about Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination to Black supporters.
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. “
It’s obvious that MAGA won’t “make an effort to understand” but will instead continue fomenting hate and resentment. They scapegoat the “radical Left” and insist that the next Civil War has truly begun. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene openly accused his Democratic colleagues of plotting a political assassination.
Democrats wanted this to happen. They’ve wanted Trump gone for years and they’re prepared to do anything to make that happen.
Just this congress, Reps. Troy A. Carter Sr., Barbara Lee, Frederica Wilson, Yvette D. Clarke, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Jasmine Crockett, Joyce Beatty, and Steve Cohen all cosponsored legislation to TERMINATE Trump’s Secret Service protection. Why would they want that? You know the reason.
Greene is no stranger to violent political rhetoric. It’s her entire brand.
Republicans and even well-meaning moderates will demand that Democrats “turn down the temperature,” but we can correctly identify Trump as an existential threat to democracy while still believing we should neutralize such threats peacefully at the ballot box. Republicans are operating solely in bad faith, as they have long abandoned actual ideas and policies and instead rely primarily on apocalyptic imagery and fear mongering. The Republican National Convention is this week and a unified party will amp up that rhetoric and embrace Trump as their strongman martyr. We can’t let that narrative go unchallenged out of misguided compassion. One of the RNC’s scheduled speakers is North Carolina gubernatorial nominee and far-right creep Mark Robinson, who promotes violence as part of his stump speech.
Assassination attempts are not always political
We get that Democrats and decent people in general want to proactively condemn political violence. However, we still don’t know the shooters’ motives. Republicans needed to see Dylann Roof’s fully annotated manifesto before accepting that he murdered Black churchgoers specifically because they were Black. Yet most Democrats quickly conceded that the shooting was political, an evil but nonetheless rational act.
John Wilkes Boothe was an agent for the Confederacy whose successful assassination of Abraham Lincoln installed a new president more sympathetic to his cause. However, recent presidential assassination attempts have lacked any direct link to an organized political cause. There are multiple conspiracy theories surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and despite the Oliver Stone film and that X-Files episode, the killer’s actual motivation remains unclear.
Gerald Ford was president for slightly more than two years but was the target of two assassination attempts: The first was on September 5, 1975, when Manson family member Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme pointed a M1911 pistol at Ford in the public grounds of the California State Capitol. She’d gotten within an arm’s length of the president. When a Secret Service agent tackled her to the ground, she said, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” Fromme reportedly wanted to set an example for those who weren’t doing enough to stop pollution.
Just 17 days later, Sara Jane Moore attempted to shoot Ford with a .38 Special revolver outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. She’d wanted to spark a violent revolution. The Secret Service had evaluated her earlier that year and concluded she wasn’t a threat. Yes, the Secret Service made mistakes even when all their agents were Clint Eastwood.
John F. Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, was mentally unwell and imagined himself a real-life Travis Bickle rescuing Jodie Foster. That shooting had absolutely nothing to do with trickle-down economy policy.
Trump has merged personal celebrity with a cult of personality, so it’s also not unreasonable to imagine that he was shot by a deranged fan, like the man who murdered John Lennon. Regardless of where a mass shooter strikes — a school, a movie theatre, or a political rally — their goal is more often a suicidal desire for notoriety.
The FBI identified the shooter as a 20-year-old loser from Bethal Park, Pennsylvania. If you’re Black or Hispanic, you likely breathed a sigh of relief when you learned he was white. The New York Times reports that the shooter “liked to play chess, video games and was learning how to code.” The FBI has found no manifesto, but that won’t stop Republicans from smearing all Democrats as somehow accountable for the shooter’s violent actions. The same people who insist that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” are convinced that heated words wounded their leader. Erick Erickson posted shortly after the shooting, “On a daily basis, MSNBC tells its audience that Trump is a threat to democracy, an authoritarian in waiting, and a would-be dictator if no one stops him. What did they think would happen? @comcast made a choice.”
We have no idea if the shooter watched or could even spell MSNBC. Fox News boasted just last week that “MSNBC averaged only 569,000 total day viewers from July 1-7 for its smallest weekly audience of the year. The progressive network also hit a low for the year among the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults aged 25-54, as MSNBC averaged only 56,000 viewers from the critical category for its worst week of 2024.”
Fox News dominates the other cable news channels and, perhaps more troubling, has posted double-digit increases in viewership among the 25 to 54 demo. That’s the rhetoric permeating the nation’s psyche, not Rachel Maddow. However, facts frequently fall to MAGA’s feelings, so you can expect an onslaught of anti-liberal propaganda in the coming months. Let’s remain firm and resolute without losing our humanity.
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This is a great article and it reminds us of the horrific statements that will be a model for the footsoldiers. All these lickspittles are one-upping each other for the favor of President Klan Robe and it's going to be a continuous escalation.
The MAGA fascist movement can't...it won't...allow the "temperature to go down."
I liked what Biden said last night, for all the good it did. He also wove in the political violence from the right very deftly (for example talking about the kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer). But we're going to have to get through Murc's Law-based coverage as Republican-owned media slobber to cover President Klan Robe. Because at the end of the day, Biden is old and competent, and brought into power by Black people. And that's boring.
And once again a parent buys a weapon of war for their kid who goes on to kill others. So tired of this happening.
I’m a public school teacher and have extensively researched the little bit of data researchers have been allowed to collect on young people and gun violence. My heart sank when I read this “loser”’s age. Yes, he attempted to commit an atrocious act but the data points to suicidal ideation in many of the shootings perpetrated by young males, including school shooters. I know we don’t have any info yet on motive but until we do, I can’t understand why no one is asking about the overt indoctrination, suicidal ideation, and easy access to firearms as a triple threat to our young people today.