As someone who has worked in gun violence prevention for a long time, I was very much struck by how much Trump’s would-be assassin fit the school shooter profile — young, male, alienated and gun-obsessed — much more than any identifiable political or ideological profile.
I realize this won’t stop Republicans from claiming he was a crazed leftist on the basis of a $15 donation to a voter registration PAC, but outside the right-wing echo chamber, as Bill Clinton would say, “that dog won’t hunt.”
I have no idea why this guy decided to target Trump, and we likely never will get a clear motive. It certainly had something to do with the fact that he was swimming in the toxic stew of gun culture. Over the past twenty to thirty years, gun clubs have transformed from gathering places for hunting enthusiasts to hotbeds of white supremacist and anti-government sentiment and activity. They are also powerful forces at the state government level, serving as an often successful organizing force against gun reform laws.
Yesterday Axios reported that a “senior House Democrat” said, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitter to say that if this is someone’s attitude then the first thing they should do is resign from Congress. My sentiments exactly. The first thing to say about this is that we see many blind quotes in publications like this and they often trigger rounds of recriminations among Democrats when it’s unclear what if anything was actually said. I’m not saying they are fabricated. I’m sure they are real in the narrow sense. But you don’t know the context of these remarks or the identity of the speaker. So it’s a really bad idea to jump to some general diagnosis of the situation based on them. These asides are meant to spark drama and attention.
With that said, though, it’s also very clear that Democrats are caught in a wild moment of demoralization and pessimism and that it is to a real degree characterological. And a lot of that is among Democratic electeds in Washington, DC, the kind who talk a lot to the newsletters. We’ve seen a lot of it on-the-record during the Biden drama.
I don’t usually flag an Axios column for your perusal. But this one may be an exception, if only to absorb the full fluffery and myth-making that places like Axios are now doing. We hear that Trump will now be like Reagan who after his attempted assassination, they quote David Broder here, became “mythic” and “politically untouchable.” Trump is no Reagan. But then neither was Reagan. I don’t know what Broder was smoking when he wrote that but after a couple-month poll bump Reagan’s public support actually went back to where it had been and then got super low for the 1982 midterms in which Republicans got walloped. He rose again after the 1982 recession in time for his 1984 blowout. In any case, the Axios piece just keeps rollin’ from there. Trump will now be able to unite America, writes CEO Jim VandeHei. Prince Hal-like, we’re told, the real Trump is a very different man in private and will now shed his public Trumpy ways and become a new man. If there’s any question Trump’s a new man post-shooting, well, they quote Tucker Carlson telling us so.
The initial shock and horror of Saturday’s shooting quickly gave way to MAGA attempts to flip the script and blame Democrats for stoking a toxic political environment and inciting violence against Trump.
For those in the back, deploring Trump’s embrace of violent threats, rhetoric and imagery is not itself an incitement to violence. Opposing Trump’s lurch toward strongman-ism is not tantamount to wishing him dead. Holding Trump accountable to the rule of law is not an invitation to take the law into one’s own hands.
For more on the MAGA post-shooting impulse to stifle criticism and disclaim responsibility for its own fetishization of violence:
TPM’s Josh Marshall: “The anger of many Trump supporters is understandable and human. … But the moment [it] pass[es] into efforts to chill or silence temperate and accurate discussions of what a second Trump presidency portends we must reject them immediately, totally and categorically.”
Joyce Vance: [T]rying to equate Democrats’ calls to defeat Trump in the election with calls for violence are wrong. They do nothing to take down the temperature in a moment when that is much needed. … Much like we should condemn the violence, this effort to place blame where it is not due should be rejected too.”
Aaron Rupar (the Trump video aggregator extraordinaire who happened to take Saturday’s rally off): “[Y]ou can condemn Trump’s shooting while also acknowledging the ugly fact that nobody has done more to worsen the climate of political violence in this country than him.”
David Frum: “Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?
No, we should not.
That sort of presumption, based on us-and-them thinking, is dangerous. It begins a chain of thinking that can lead to more violence. We are the victims, and they are the aggressors. We have been hurt, so it must have been them. No one thinking this way ever asks about the violence on one’s own side.
And this way of thinking is also very often erroneous. The history of the far right tells a different story, one in which violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it.
Steady, People, Steady
A key difference between crazy right-wing conspiracy theories and crazy left-wing conspiracy theories is that Democratic leaders have not embraced them, utilized them for political purposes, associated themselves with them as a signal to supporters, or otherwise picked up and incorporated the associated argot into their own political rhetoric. That is a huge difference and makes comparing the two fraught at best and deeply misleading at worst.
In his televised address last night from the Oval Office, President Biden noted that not only was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump an attack on democracy but so was the killing and wounding of his supporters, assembled freely at a political rally exercising core constitutional rights. A perhaps subtle but important additional point.
In much the same way as the security failures in DC on Jan. 6 were open and obvious, the Secret Service cordon around former President Trump at Saturday’s rally was clearly flawed.
For anyone who has attended any public outdoors event featuring a Secret Service protectee, one of the defining elements is the presence of Secret Service sharpshooters and lookouts on rooftops and any other elevated positions with lines of sight to the protectee. It’s the thing about these events that makes the hair on your neck stand up. That’s part of what makes the initial reports about the shooter’s unfettered access so shocking.
Republican National Convention Kicks Off In Milwaukee
Former President Trump arrived Sunday in Milwaukee ahead of the start of the Republican National Convention. By my count it is the fourth of the last five GOP conventions to open under the specter of outsized external events:
2008 (John McCain): Global financial crisis
2012: (Mitt Romney): Hurricane Isaac
2020 (Donald Trump): COVID pandemic
2024 (Donald Trump): Assassination attempt on Trump
National political conventions were already like mini-fortresses dropped into the downtown of an American city, but security will still be top of mind after Saturday’s shooting. Otherwise, the RNC looks poised to proceed more or less as originally planned.
Looking Ahead To Election Day …
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: GOPers Spin Up Fresh Conspiracy Theories About New Law To Block Baseless Election Challenges
NYT: Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat
Judge Dismisses Rudy G’s Bankruptcy Case
Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss can now resume collecting their $148 million defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani after a judge dismissed his Chapter 11 bankruptcy case Friday due to his failure to comply with the rules.
TPM Reader KO sent me this lede from an AP piece from February of this year.
Former President Donald Trump told thousands of members of the National Rifle Association that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he returns to the White House, and bragged that during his time as president he “did nothing” to curb guns.
“During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield,” he said as he addressed the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Friday evening.
From TPM Reader GS, the email that I referred to in the previous post up earlier this evening …
We still know very little about the shooter – but perhaps he has more in common with the way too common mass shooters rather than Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan.
There is the young age and apparent social rejection/isolation, and also the obv suicidal nature of trying to kill a heavily guarded former President from an exposed and visible position.
We do not know that at this point, but if that turns out to be the case, then that is a completely different social context. Then it is not yet another case of political violence but yet another case of the epidemic of mass shootings, usually by young men.
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.
There are a handful of new polls which have come out in the last 24 hours, all before the events of yesterday afternoon. They each show Biden either one or two points behind or the same margin ahead, with the average leaning toward the former. This is roughly back, though not quite, to where they were the day before the debate.
