Unbalanced is the new black

Here’s a question: Why hasn’t there been more shock about the second (apparent) attempt on the life of Donald Trump in as many months?  I mean, the biggest headline in my newsfeed this morning was Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s claim that he and his running mate “created” the “cat memes” about Springfield, Ohio, seemingly bragging about bringing the national spotlight to the small town. Further down in the list was a story about the clearly unbalanced creep who was arrested in Florida for allegedly attempting to kill Trump. The guy, a 58-year-old fantasist who tried to volunteer to fight for Ukraine against Russia, and was turned down, was charged Monday with two violations of federal weapons laws – possession of a weapon as a felon, and possession of a weapon with its serial number filed off — but not, notably, for attempting to assassinate the former president.

Get that? They had a suspect who was arrested after a Secret Service agent saw the barrel of his gun sticking out of the bushes several hundred yards away from Trump, who was golfing, and they had to dust off two federal laws to get something to charge him with. What’s his name? Does it even matter? Do you remember the name of the Butler, Pennsylvania guy who actually got off a shot at Trump that grazed his ear (or did something to make it bleed anyway)?

This sums up where we stand as a nation. When you can’t even remember the names of people who tried to assassinate a former president of the United States, something is unbalanced other than the two weirdos with the guns. 

Their names, just for the record, are Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, the one who actually drew blood from Trump and killed one person attending his rally, and Ryan W. Routh, 58, who “did not have Mr. Trump in his sightline and did not fire his semiautomatic rifle,” according to a statement by the acting director of the Secret Service.

Nobody has been able to make any sense of either of these two-bit wonders. Crooks was a registered Republican who reportedly posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant rants on social media. Routh is said to have voted for Trump in 2016 but voted in the Democratic primary election this year. Routh flew to Ukraine in 2022 and attempted to volunteer. When he was turned down, he began an imaginary campaign to supply Ukraine with former Afghan fighters.  A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreigners Coordination Department of the Land Forces Command told CNN that Routh’s “messages and ideas” were “delusional.” Suffice to say that neither the FBI nor anyone else has been able to nail down a motive for either Crooks or Routh.

So, naturally, Trump and his minions have settled on blaming it all on the Democrats saying that their “nasty campaign language” about Trump being a threat to democracy…because, you know, both of the apparent assassins paid so much attention to the nature of the political language in this election. Not.

We clearly have a problem in this country when it comes to presidential elections, and the problem has a name, Donald Trump. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton in 2015 who descended a golden escalator and gave a speech about Mexico sending rapists and drugs and criminals into the country.  Trump’s rhetoric, from the very beginning of his campaign, was so extreme that reporters couldn’t really get a grip on how to react to it.  Later in the campaign Trump called for violence against protesters at his rallies and told audiences that if they “beat the hell out of” people, he would pay their legal costs. It took months and months for the New York Times to use the word “lie” in a story about something Trump said. 

The fact is that the media in this country wasn’t prepared for Donald Trump or the kind of things he says or the kind of person he is. The “Access Hollywood” tape – remember “locker room talk”? – didn’t even dent his campaign in 2016 when it came out because it was already known that Trump had been accused by twenty or more women of sexual harassment and assault.  The mistake Trump made in paying off Stormy Daniels in 2016 was his assumption that it would have mattered if it came out that he had had an extramarital affair with an adult film star. In the end, it only mattered to Trump, as the payoffs to keep Daniels silent ended up being part of the New York charges of fraud that got him convicted on 34 counts.

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Now here we are in 2024, and what are Donald Trump and JD Vance running on?  Stories that even Vance admits were made up about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of their neighbors in the small Ohio town of Springfield.  Trump is so desperate for an issue he can use to stop the ascent of Kamala Harris in the polls that his campaign recently announced plans to hold a rally in Springfield, where presumably the balloon of fake stories about Haitian immigrants will get blown up with even more Trump lies.

Donald Trump has been on a three-year-long campaign to subsume violence into American political life by trying to turn the incredible, violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, during which more than 140 police officers were injured and multiple people lost their lives, into an exercise in some kind of twisted right-wing patriotism.  According to Trump’s rhetoric, which has found its echo throughout the Republican Party, those convicted of offenses on Jan. 6, including charges of violence against police officers and damaging the Capitol building, are “hostages” held against their will by a corrupt and illegitimate government.

This kind of rhetoric and these kinds of lies have broken the political life in this country so profoundly that it is unrecognizable to anyone who was alive to see the campaigns of John F. Kennedy, both the Bushes, Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama.  Beginning in 2015, violent rhetoric and actual violence entered our politics in the words and actions of one man, Donald Trump.

Down became up and up became down and unbalanced became the new black.