When a lunatic nearly stabbed the husband of then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, to death mocked and ridiculed. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters ardent promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi somehow led to the assault through a sexual accident.
After authorities busted a right-wing extremist plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Trump downplayed the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up”. Trump he laughed and replied“Lock them all up.”
Fascism feeds on violence. In the years since his own supporters stormed the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening to harm Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed invaders, would-be hijackers and would-be assassins as martyrs and hostages. h I vowed to forgive them if returned to office. His staff witnessed to the glee with which Trump watched the chaos on television.
Now he, too, is moved by the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite others to do. The attempted assassination of Trump – and the assassination of a person nearby – is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this horrific act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Regardless of his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the lapse in law enforcement that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and to look up to a presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.
Unfortunately, it is incorrect to say, as many have said, that political violence has “no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That remains to this day. In 2016and even more so in 2020. Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. Mussolini’s movement in Italy built imposing monuments to his fallen comrades. Trump’s movement is now improving it: the leader himself will be the chief martyr, and his blood the basis of his struggle for power and revenge.
The 2024 election is already shaping up to be a symbolic contest between older and weakened liberalisms too fragile and insecure to protect themselves and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to break down every barrier and destroy every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of American voters, but the passion and courage of that minority has made up for what it lacks in numbers. In the wake of the shooting, Trump and his supporters hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fists and a call to “Fight!” to call wavering on their goal of installing Trump as an unconstitutional ruler, exempted from regular law by his allies on the Supreme Court.
Other societies have regressed into authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, US troops are not at war anywhere. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. The short spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Social health indicators have a sudden became positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his tenure. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; of marriages and of birth are growing. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants cross the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the American job market is among the hottest in the world.
Yet despite all this success, Americans are considering a form of self-mutilation that in other countries usually accompanies the darkest national failures: releasing the perpetrators of a failed coup return to the office to try again.
One of the reasons why this self-harm is coming to an end is that American society is ill-prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in American politics usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals may be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus, which stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would frighten that powerful consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. They never gained permanent power over state institutions, they caught fire and burned.
Trump is different. His abuses were ratified by powerful constituencies. He conquered and colonized one of the two main parties. He has defeated – or is on track to defeat – every impeachment and prosecution that holds him accountable for his frauds and crimes. He has amassed a following that is larger, more enduring, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s horrific event to extend the Trump era for the rest of his life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. This inevitably adapts and naturalizes him. His advisers, even thugs and criminals, join in the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of America’s elite. President Joe Biden nearly destroyed his campaign because he felt obligated to meet Trump in a debate. How could Biden do otherwise? Trump is a three-time Republican Party nominee; it is inconvenient and strange to treat him as a rebel against the American state – even though Trump was and is.
The despicable shooting of Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures him an undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The corresponding expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the added effect of acclimating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such outrage, the familiar and correct practice is to emphasize unity, to proclaim that Americans have more in common than they share. Those reassuring words, true in the past, are less true now.
No one seems to have the language to say: we abhor, reject, reject and punish all political violence, even though we claim that Trump remains a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions and the exact opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome on stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against America’s allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed a bit with age or experience. Yet all these urgent and necessary truths must now be subjected to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for one who has never thought or said a prayer for any of the victims of his many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to them defend rights of dangerous people to possess military-style weapons says he was hit by a bullet from one such assault rifle.
Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fulfill a useful function in social life. “Thank you for your service” we say to the decorated hero and the veteran who barely escaped a dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering what was what. We wish you a “Happy New Year!” even as we dread the months ahead.
But conventional phrases do not go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings that are no less powerful because they are rote and reflexive. By rightly condemning violence, we grant implicit pardon to the most violent figure in contemporary American politics. By affirming unity, we liberate the man who seeks power through the humiliation and subjugation of despised others.
Those conventional phrases inscribe Trump in a place in American life that he was destined to lose without redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people applaud the sparing of his life. Trump should count on an orderly legal process, not the bloodshed he looked forward to when it befell others. He and his allies will use vicious gunmen’s crime as their way to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those fighting Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at opposite ends of the bullet’s trajectory, are nevertheless united as common enemies rights and democracy.
