Less than two months ago, Donald Trump was nearly killed on live television. Amazingly, this extraordinary story has already been memory-holed. Among the mainstream news, there is shockingly little curiosity about what the perpetrator believed, his motives, and how he was able to nearly kill a leading presidential candidate.
This attack followed years of extreme rhetoric against Trump, describing him as a unique threat to democracy, claims accompanied by unprecedented criminal prosecutions and civil suits, which collectively aim to force him out of the race and otherwise ruin his life.
In the wake of the shooting and Trump’s miraculous survival, there was a brief moment of bipartisan magnanimity. In the immediate aftermath, President Biden said, “I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally . . . There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.”
He added later, “It’s sick. It’s sick. That’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. You cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”
This was all very welcome, and Biden was not alone. People across the spectrum condemned the shooting. It was a wake-up call. Regardless of one’s personal politics, most people recognized that it would have been a disaster for the country if Trump had been killed. In addition to being the most violent and extreme type of election interference, it would have fueled, with some basis in reality, a lot of suspicion and hostility on the right about conspiracies involving the Deep State.
In addition to widespread concern over the Secret Service’s poor performance, many recognized that both sides of the political spectrum bore some risk from their violent fringe and that political rhetoric from the mainstream had an influence on this fringe. In other words, what happened was not confined either to Trump haters or extremist Trump supporters. Neither side has a monopoly on this type of dangerous, illegal behavior.
Once upon a time, the left gave birth to the Weather Underground and, more recently, the Antifa mobs of 2020. For the right, there was Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City Bombing almost 30 years ago and the Oakland “boogaloo” shooters in 2020.
It appeared briefly that political rhetoric might be toned down on both sides. But after a period of calm and a superficially patriotic convention, the Democrats are turning up the rhetorical heat again. I am not sure if it is happening because of declining internal poll numbers or maybe it’s just habit, but there’s a noticeable change.
For example, a recent ad describes Trump, in the words of the New Republic, as a “Crazed, Corrupt Dictator Seeking ‘Revenge.’”
At the DNC, amid the flag-waving and praise for the community, one speaker after another had pure venom for Trump and his supporters. For them, he is the apotheosis of evil: divisive, dishonest, racist, sexist, selfish, venal, a draft dodger, greedy, and all the rest.
Finally, in the biggest broad-based attack on essentially every Trump supporter, Biden gave his infamous speech in Philadelphia in 2022 on the evils of “MAGA Republicans.” He pulled no punches and went after Trump’s supporters in addition to Trump himself. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election . . . They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”
These words from the president and his supporters do not precisely call for violence. But they do attack their opponents’ right to rule if Trump somehow wins a majority of the votes.
To make an analogy, while I think most of the rhetoric about the events of January 6 is exaggerated, I also thought at the time that the whole thing was irresponsible and a self-own. I said, “The Capitol protest will continue to do more harm than good, not least because it was tainted by violence. While Trump is not legally responsible for violence done by his supporters, his post-election rhetoric and calls for a march on the Capitol led his supporters into a trap. These people believed that somehow, if they were numerous and energetic enough, their efforts and their presence would have to change the results. This is not how things work.”
While not an explicit call for violence, calling an election stolen—or its opposite, calling Trump’s 2016 election the product of Russian collusion—is extremely provocative. If the election was in fact stolen, the government lacks legitimacy. If the government lacks legitimacy, then our country’s revolutionary political origins suggest it may be overthrown. Similarly, if a president is actually a Manchurian Candidate, colluding with and doing the bidding of a hostile foreign power, it suggests all the federal officers and workers who took an oath to the Constitution can disregard and resist him.
A few small changes would likely do a lot to add to social peace. For starters, the whole country should adopt election best practices, like paper ballots that remain with the machines, the provision of government ID by voters, and counting all votes on or before election day. This leads to a verifiable, swift, and bipartisan ascent to the results.
As it stands, there is no way to audit most elections or even conduct an efficient recount in many jurisdictions, as we saw with the long post-election counts in 2020. It is as if Florida’s “hanging chad” problem of 2000 has now been purposely repeated elsewhere in the name of maximum access to accommodate the most disorganized and procrastinating of voters.
Second, particularly among high-level candidates, both sides should err on the side of calling opponents mistaken, ineffective, or simply possessed of different values, rather than as evil liars or threats to democracy. Everyone overdoes it in this department from time to time, of course, and I don’t mean to downplay the stakes, as I think this election is very important. But after a smoke-filled room removal of Joe Biden from the running and the recent near-assassination of Donald Trump, other considerations besides victory should have some weight among everyone who considers himself a patriot.
It does not look like this is going to happen. The Democrats hate Trump with a white-hot passion I have never seen before, even against Reagan or George W. Bush at the height of the Iraq War. Perhaps Nixon was on that level, and they did run him out of office.
I also don’t think both sides are identical in this regard. While Biden became a hated figure after the COVID mandates of 2021 and his MAGA Republicans’ speech, Republicans seem more amused by Kamala Harris, dismissing her merely as a bit inauthentic and in way over her head.
This makes sense. Harris lacks the aggressive personality of Hilary Clinton or the charisma of Barack Obama, so people who oppose her are not as inspired by enmity as they were in 2016. I think people realize that her historical candidacy, if successful, would lead to very unhistorical changes in policy and performance. Instead, she would almost certainly ratify the business-as-usual committee governance that characterized the Biden administration.
There’s time for a wide range of very bad things to happen between now and election day and, for the good of the country, we should all pray they do not happen. Politics is important, as is our president, but the country has some enduring qualities that should be protected in a way that weathers the storm regardless of the result.