The attempted assassination of Donald Trump should be a wake-up call.
In moments like these, writing anything at all feels like an imprudent exercise. It’s hard to think of anything that will make a positive contribution to the discourse. The most prudent course would be to say nothing at all, gather information, and produce something of value when passions have cooled. But taking that path means ceding the environment to firebrands and political vandals whose enterprise depends on thoughtless fervor. If writing injudiciously risks exacerbating tensions in a political landscape rife with them, it’s just as irresponsible to allow the miscreants and demagogues to control the mic. So here goes.
Americans on the political right have spent the better part of a decade being lectured to about their side’s penchant for political violence while, in their justified perception, the violence was being disproportionately meted out against them by their adversaries. They have every reason to resent that dynamic.
This was true in 2016, when Trump supporters were assaulted, peppered with eggs, and had the clothes torn off their backs at one of the former president’s rallies in Costa Mesa, California. Police fired pepper spray and smoke grenades into the crowd that was hurling rocks and water bottles at them at a Trump event in New Mexico that same year. In Chicago, protesters chanted “shut s*** down” as they descended on a pro-Trump event. Dozens were arrested following a riot in which two officers were injured, but the demonstrators did succeed in forcing the Trump campaign to postpone its event.
Many conservatives and Republicans long ago concluded that this violence and the elaborate intellectual framework that justifies brutality to advance political objectives has gone relatively unremarked upon. They saw the national press turn the attempted massacre of Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball game practice in 2017 by a deranged consumer of left-wing media into a two-day story. They witnessed prominent public officials and mainstream news outlets bend over backward to make excuses for the rioters who set nearly every major American metro area alight in 2020. They burned, and thieved, and destroyed, we were told, in service to a noble political principle, and we were expected to defer to the principle and excuse the methods applied in its pursuit. And now, a Trump rally attendee is dead — shot with the bullet meant for Donald Trump’s head.
I don’t blame those who respond to all this with outrage, but I am moved more to despair. While partisans on the Left seem utterly incapable of seeing the violence directed at the American Right as an outgrowth of their failure to observe prudence and propriety, the Right is just as capable of talking themselves out of seeing their own incitements. They absolve the president of his responsibility for violence. He promises to “pay for the legal fees” incurred by his supporters who “knock the crap” out of attendees, and they look the other way when his fans go and do just that. They don’t reckon with the instigations that culminated in a mercifully unsuccessful mail-bombing campaign targeting Trump critics in the press. They have argued themselves into exonerating the former president for his role in the provocations that produced the attack on the Capitol.
Neither side in this drama can countenance their roles in this escalating series of horrors. Few even remember which aggravation or insult inaugurated our slide into the abyss, of which the latest episode of violence and terror is only a reprisal for the last. Events like Saturday’s beget a few half-hearted hours of reflection on the reckless state of modern political rhetoric, but whatever resolve those moments produce dissolves into an ocean of recriminations from partisans who decry the false moral equivalence in observing that both sides of the American political spectrum are increasingly acclimated to violence. Thus, men and women of conscience stifle their concerns, and we go on as before tripping languidly toward catastrophe.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump should be a wake-up call. We are not collectively to blame for the actions of someone so disturbed that he would attempt this psychotic act, but none of us are vindicated by it, either. The responsible political actors — Democrats and Republicans alike — who deemed this vicious act an “attack on democracy” are correct — it was an assault on all of us. But so, too, were the myriad attacks on Trump supporters in 2016. So, too, was the congressional baseball shooting and the 2020 riots. So, too, were the Trump fans who assaulted protesters. So, too, was January 6.
Those who are still tempted by the passions of politics are galvanized by the attempted murder of the former president. His opponents retain their appetite for litigating the case that Trump is the sole instigator of the conditions that have once again made violence a reliable feature of the American political landscape. I am persuaded to despondency. The nation came centimeters away from a cataclysm of unknowable proportions, but so few of its most prominent citizens will grapple with the metastatic cancer on the civic compact that brought us to this mournful place. We will go on berating one another, bombarding the public with the empty pugilistic bombast that has become currency on social media, excusing the worst excesses of our side, and blaming the other for its instigations. This is a course toward disaster, but no one seems inclined to navigate away from the shoals. And one day, our luck will run out.
See? I knew I shouldn’t have written anything.