Trump survives shooting, but the politically charged blame game never fades
Former President Trump may have survived the Saturday evening attempt on his life, but the rhetorical blame game is virtually certain to rear its ugly head in the event's wake.
The assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was a chilling and frightening moment in the history of a country that has seen too many such shootings.
We are all grateful, of course, that the former president was not wounded more seriously and for the Secret Service agents who protected him.
I am especially grateful that President Biden, who called Trump Saturday night, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats have united in declaring that political violence is absolutely unacceptable, in wishing Trump well, in praying for him, and in immediately putting partisanship aside.
Trump having the instinct to pump his fist several times in efforts to reassure his supporters that he was all right despite the blood on his face – an image that may have changed the campaign – is naturally part of the story.
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But some ugliness also emerged in the wake of the bullets fired by the 20-year-old, who was killed, and that needs to be forcefully called out as well.
We have had enough of the cynical attempts to blame horrific shootings on the left or right, or on public figures who had nothing to do with it, by exploiting a tragedy to score cheap political points.
While Trump was fortunate to have only his ear grazed by a bullet, spared by perhaps an inch, one person in the Pittsburgh-area crowd was killed.
Those who peddle the mean-spirited "blood on his hands" theories, especially on places like X, should just be ignored. The media shouldn’t take the bait, even if it generates clicks and ratings. The blame game is corrosive and irrelevant.
Even those who can’t stand Trump decried the attempt to kill him, and I hope that brief interlude of honesty and humanity would be the same if the target was Biden or Vice President Harris.
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Whether it’s a mass shooting or a targeted one, the only person to blame is the one who pulled the trigger. Our country has lost four presidents to assassins: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and JFK. Two other presidents have been injured by would-be assassins, Teddy Roosevelt and, more than four decades ago, Ronald Reagan.
The connective tissue here is that the murderers and would-be murderers are crazy. You have to be insane to risk death or life imprisonment by firing upon innocent people, or heavily protected leaders. Unless there is evidence of a wider conspiracy, these nutjobs acted alone.
And I don’t really care, in the inevitable profiles, how angry or disaffected they are. That’s why, as in this case, I long ago stopped using their names, so as not to inspire others to seek such infamy.
The killer, who also had explosives in his car, was a registered Republican, but also donated $15 to a progressive group, leaving the question of motive a muddle.
Trump said after the shooting that we must "stand united" and "remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness." Biden called the violence "sick" and said "we cannot condone this," adding yesterday: "It’s not America." Speaker Mike Johnson said "we’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country."
Those are welcome words, but such pleas didn’t stop Rep. Lauren Boebert and Sen. J.D. Vance from blaming the shooting on Biden’s rhetoric.
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If the president had wanted to capitalize on the shooting, he could have noted that hours earlier he had called for gun control, while accusing Trump of doing the bidding of the NRA. Some Trump supporters, though, ripped Biden for saying he would put Trump in a "bullseye," though he was obviously using a political metaphor.
Trump himself has often been accused of fomenting violence with some of his harsher language at rallies, so it’s ironic that he came close to being a victim.
Yet it’s also true that Trump has been pounded by the press for nine long years, particularly after Jan. 6, and castigated as an aspiring dictator and danger to democracy, even going so far as morphing his face into that of Hitler on a recent The New Republic cover.
Such demonization could easily convince a mentally unbalanced person that the world would be better off without him.
The left has certainly employed the tactic. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton, who had used his presidential pulpit to criticize Rush Limbaugh, denounced "reckless speech" and said the airwaves are too often used "to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other." As part of my front-page story, I reported that the radio talk show host was accusing liberals of trying to whip up a "national hysteria" against the conservative movement.
The 1981 shooting of Reagan was done outside the Washington Hilton by a maniac who wanted to impress Jodie Foster. (I had to knock on doors to find a phone after racing to the hospital, and later reported from paramedics that Reagan had lost far more blood than the White House had acknowledged.)
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The 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson sparked an irrational attack blaming Sarah Palin because her campaign had released a political map with crosshairs marking the Democratic districts being targeted.
I wrote a piece calling this ludicrous, and critical colleagues eventually concluded I was right, as the lunatic who wounded the then-congressswoman and killed six others had never seen the map before the massacre. Palin unsuccessfully sued the New York Times after a sloppy editorial revived the smear.
And in Virginia in 2017, a gunman opened fire on a Republican baseball practice, nearly killing House GOP Whip Steve Scalise. Since the shooter was an unabashed liberal and Rachel Maddow fan, the right went on offense and the left said ideology had nothing to do with the tragedy.
As for the motivations of mass shooters – in Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Buffalo, Uvalde and others too numerous to recount – think of the utter remorselessness and detachment from reality required to kill large numbers of strangers, including children, in a ballroom or classroom.
The miraculous survival of Donald Trump, while electrifying this week’s Republican convention, is a stark reminder that real human beings are engaged in what we euphemistically call political warfare.
Though, if history is any guide, the finger-pointing and gun-control debating will quickly resume as so many of us wonder why political violence in our society seems like an unfixable problem.