With the upheaval surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump — for that’s what it was— much remains unclear this following night. How could security at a political rally for a presidential candidate of Trump’s provocativeness (if that’s the right word) have broken down to the extent that such an obvious line-of-sight, long-range attempt on a candidate’s life would be feasible? Who was the idiot who attempted this, and what were his motivations?
But most of all, what does this mean for our immediate political climate, and the election in November?
Let’s put aside the sanctimonious pearl-clutching about how this could happen in America. It happens in America with sickening regularity. I was a teenager when our country’s president, the leader of its civil rights movement, and a candidate for its presidency, were all killed by assassins’ bullets in a span of less than five years. And that’s not counting the many failed attempts on the lives of public figures, on Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, on Gabby Giffords on Gretchen Whitney, on Steve Scalise and six others, on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and on and on in the years since. This is old news, and all the more disgusting for its being old. That it is part and parcel of our national love of guns and our brainless genuflection before the Second Amendment as though it were holy writ goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway.
Then the mind turns, reluctantly but compulsively, to what this means politically. And there too the news is nothing but bad. Yes, there may be an impulse, perhaps sustained but most likely brief, to rein in the ridiculous hyperbole that each party has unleashed on the other, the Democrats hyperventilating about Trump’s existential threat to democracy, Trump declaring himself an incarnation of his followers’ retribution, their last hope to “take America back” before the country spirals irretrievably into the progressive abyss.
But after that hiatus, the vitriol will undoubtedly return, and with it, a new projection of Trump as a martyr to the cause, the wounded warrior with blood running down his face but his fist raised in defiance. They couldn’t stop him with frivolous lawsuits and politically-motivated prosecutions, they couldn’t stop him with felony convictions, and they couldn’t stop him with bullets. How could it not be, when a few millimeters’ difference would have meant a bullet in his brain, that he was spared, miraculously, so that he could continue his great campaign to make America great again? Surely God had a hand, and today cast His vote.
In short, if a diabolically cynical campaign manager could have successfully staged what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania today — the shots, the candidate bloodied but unbowed, the constituency utterly galvanized, the undecided swayed by sympathy — he would have. It’s pure gold to the cause of Trump, to be beaten into a heap of political coinage in the few months that remain.
All the more reason that the Biden campaign needs to acknowledge the near inevitability of a Trump victory, fold its already buffeted tent, and allow a more viable (in every sense) contender to engage in what we can only hope will be a more civil, policy-driven campaign.