Member Newsletter
Let me share some reactions to Saturday’s surreal and horrifying attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The first is that so much about Trump and the whole world he has brought into being is bombast and fakery. So much about Trump’s world is carried over from the world of professional wrestling, the bombast and taunts, histrionic and willfully over-the-top presentation, the play-acting. Friends become enemies and then friends again. There is high-tension falling out and then making back up. And at it’s core the whole thing is fake. It’s all one big reality show.
But this was not fake. This was as real and grave as it gets. A deranged kid — it really seems to me this guy may not have had any recognizable politics, though we might find that he did — came within an inch of assassinating Trump on live TV. Beyond the personal tragedy and the grave wound to our whole political system, it is difficult and terrifying to imagine what that act would have unleashed. And by the merest luck it didn’t happen.