It’s unacceptably trite to say that we knew something like this would happen. But on some level, how could we not? Despite the expressions of sympathy and support from both Donald Trump’s allies and his most committed political opponents, and the ritual pronouncements that political violence is unacceptable, no one in America can truly be surprised by each new outbreak of mayhem and bloodshed, whether it occurs on the streets of a large city, inside a rural church or a suburban big-box retail store, or at a presidential campaign rally in post-industrial western Pennsylvania.
It appears that Trump was not seriously injured in a probable assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. He posted on Truth Social that he “was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” Two other people have died in this incident, according to local officials. One of them was the presumed shooter, reportedly killed by the Secret Service, and the other was a person not yet identified at the time of writing, very likely a rally attendee who was shot accidentally. Two additional spectators were injured, according to the Secret Service.
In other words, what happened in Butler was bad enough, and it could have been much worse. What is about to happen will very likely be even more damaging, as we move from fragmentary news reporting into the realm of speculation, name-calling, finger-pointing, conspiracy theory and half-baked political forecasting. Any pause in the 2024 presidential campaign following this incident will be brief: The Republican National Convention begins on Monday in Milwaukee, and Trump is scheduled to accept the party’s nomination in a nationally televised speech on Thursday evening.
We live in the worst possible version of a choose-your-own-adventure video game, powerless to control events but endlessly free to invent our own hidden messages.
We may or may not learn salient facts about the alleged Pennsylvania shooter and their motivations in the days to come, but it is not overly cynical to say that the facts about such events barely matter. Consider what we know, or believe we know, about the police killing of George Floyd, the near-fatal attack on Paul Pelosi or the mass shootings burned into our collective memory in Uvalde or Parkland or Sandy Hook. Consider the national Rorschach test of Jan. 6, 2021, an event that for millions of Americans has been transformed from one kind of thing to another, from an outrageous violation to a heroic act of resistance. For that matter, consider the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s, which remain the source of unresolved national trauma and a wellspring for unified-field conspiracy theories of every possible variety.
None of those events, or dozens of others we could name, can adequately be explained or consigned to the past with the help of psychoanalysis or political screeds on Facebook or the tortured manifestos left behind by murderers. To a large extent, we never really know what drives people to commit acts of irrational violence — or, to put it more accurately, we are overloaded with too many reasons, and we all get to pick the ones that support our existing worldview. So it will be, unhappily for our rapidly decomposing polity, with this apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump. We live in the worst possible version of a choose-your-own-adventure video game, powerless to control events but endlessly free to concoct our own hidden messages and secret meanings, based on whatever actual or invented evidence we like.
It wasn’t surprising that as soon as reports emerged that shots had been fired at Trump, social media erupted with outlandish allegations that Joe Biden had ordered a hit on his nemesis or, conversely, that the incident was a false-flag operation meant to cast blame on Trump-hating liberals and provoke a wave of sympathy for the recently-convicted ex-president. In the days ahead, liberal or left-leaning pundits will no doubt soberly propose that the MAGA movement brought this event on itself by constantly invoking a fascist-flavored rhetoric of violent retribution. Conservatives will counter that this attack was the result of Trump derangement syndrome and the left’s congenital contempt for the desires and yearnings of “real Americans.”
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Blaming the outbreaks of unhinged violence that make American society virtually unique in the world on one political faction, one socioeconomic group or one cultural grouping strikes me as missing the point entirely. We — if there is still a “we,” which is open to doubt — created this tragic, farcical situation, in which two elderly candidates no one particularly likes are running against each other in an election most of us dread, and someone tried to kill one of them this weekend for reasons we simultaneously do not understand and understand all too well.
We all did that. We traveled to this bad place together, which means, in theory, that we can still decide to go somewhere else, and be different than this. We might start by not saying things that are blatantly and outrageously untrue, whenever something like this happens.
Bill Clinton posted a message on X late on Saturday that began, “Violence has no place in America.” What can that possibly mean, coming from a person who spent eight years as the actual president of a nation that was born in violence and has been infused with violence throughout its existence, and which has inflicted immense violence on its own people, its perceived enemies and an unknowable number of innocent people around the world?
Many other people said essentially the same thing, of course: It’s a ritual refusal to tell the truth or look in the mirror, as counterfactual and illogical as any of the magical thinking found in organized religion. What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night — whomever we want to blame for it and whatever explanations we want to concoct — was quintessentially American, an act drawn from our national history, our national heritage, our national soul. Face that fact honestly, and maybe we can get somewhere.