Trump Is Fine; How About the Rest of Us?

What we know and what we don't and how we can think about all this

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Former Pres. Donald Trump, seeking his shoe as he’s hoisted to his feet after yesterday’s shooting in a non-iconic pose, not defiantly raising his fist in front of an American flag. (Screengrab / NY Times video.)

Within minutes last night, people across the political spectrum were speculating — on social media where people could see their brain happenings — that Pres. Joe Biden ordered the assassination. Or that former Pres. Donald Trump faked it.

And, gentle Newsfuckers, they had reasons. 

Look at that angle! No way that could have happened unless my explanation is true!

Then there were the standard, time-tested dumbnesses: The claims of an interventionist God. A god who hates Trump’s right ear and the other casualties. Claiming “God saved X” is a stupid, morally vile practice that implies God doesn’t give a shit about people who get killed or hurt. So naturally we saw it in action yesterday.

“God protected President Trump,” vice-presidential wannabe Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) dumbed, without mentioning that God didn’t protect Trump’s ear.

“The hand of God surely protected him today,” former Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) dumbed, without mentioning that the hand of God missed a spot on the ear of Trump.

When they claim falsely that God assessed the situation and ensured that the bullets went where He wanted them, they’re saying, not just implying, that God chose where the bullets should go or at least failed to protect the other people in their path.

In this case, that includes two people seriously wounded without the protection of the hand of God, and a fatality, firefighter Corey Comperatore, whose head God implicitly had no stake in protecting.

Then there was Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), who said “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Keep in mind, we still don’t know whether Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter, was motivated by hatred of Trump or love of Jodie Foster or who knows what. But there’s Collins, stupiding that Biden should be arrested.

Collins — and others on the right — did have a point that it was a shitty choice of words last week when Biden talked about putting “a bullseye” on Trump. That was exactly the rap on Sarah Palin after then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head. It was a fair rap then and it’s fair now.

Maybe let’s don’t use shooting metaphors in a country that’s got more small arms than all the Jurassic Park movies combined.

Which raises the question of, how do we talk about our political enemies?

As I’ve argued before, democracy isn’t a bright line over which Trump and Trump alone intends to drag us. Democrats, too, have flouted democratic norms.

In both parties, members, and leaders speak about their opponents in apocalyptic terms, as threats to democracy or the economy or our very lives or whatever.

As Rubio’s veep rival, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

First, we don’t know what led to the shooting. It could’ve been processed foods for all we know. And second, Biden’s never said at all costs.

Even with those caveats, though, Vance has a point. If you say that a Trump represidency will mark the end of democracy, what means are you not endorsing to preserve a system that was created by violent means?

When Democrats do this, however, the implicit argument is that democracy must be defended with democracy. Saving democracy means using democratic means to do so.

What makes that so terrifying is that the people of a democracy can choose democratically not to be a democracy.

That is what Democrats are fighting against. They’re asking Americans to choose a more democratic path.

So that’s how you square the circle of speaking in apocalyptic terms about your political foes without endorsing violence against them. Violence is undemocratic. (Which is why I always opposed punching fascists. Whether you’re punching hippies or fascists, if you’re punching, you’re the fascist.)

Republican political rhetoric, on the other hand, is gleefully undemocratic. Not to preserve messy, conflict-ridden democracy, but for the sake of order, control.

Republican leaders, Trump included, have demonized individual Democrats in terms and degree asymmetrically. If Democratic rhetoric implicitly justified violence, Republican rhetoric did so explicitly.

Here’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC): “Some folks need killing.”

Here’s Trump himself getting laughs invoking the far more brutal and damaging attack on the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

There’s an old joke that comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die; tragedy is when I cut my finger. The reason that’s a joke is because the egocentrism is so blindingly clear.

Nevertheless, the party that laughs when others fall through the manholes their tax cuts leave open is now capitalizing on the tragedy of its wounded ear. The Republican Party is already fundraising off of this and will attempt to hagiographize Trump and rewrite his origin story so that he was born on the planet Krypton.

The party that organized at the 2004 Republican convention ridicule of the recognition, Purple Heart included, that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) had received for service in combat during Vietnam, will this week portray Trump as a saint, martyr, and superhero all in one.

And people who don’t want a Trump represidency will freak out, feeling impotent in the face of what now seems like an insurmountable story and public image powering the Trump train all the way to November. (In no small part thanks to media choosing pictures and storytelling driven by their guts — look at that iconic photo! — rather than by a sense of conveying the entirety of what happened.)

Well, keep in mind that Pres. Ronald Reagan was shot and gravely injured on March 30, 1981. By May, 68% of the country approved of how he was doing his job. And not because he had been prevented from doing it while he recovered. It was because people felt bad for the guy. Even if you disagreed with him on things like whether Americans had the right to bargain collectively, you felt like shit telling a pollster you disapproved of the guy while he was still in a hospital bed.

But by June Reagan was right back where he’d been before the shooting, high 50s-low 60s percentiles. By the end of the year most of the country didn’t approve.

Remember when everyone said last month’s debate would be the defining moment of the race? And we non-pundits called bullshit? Well, despite the media’s shameless slobbering over the nationalistic, violence-glorifying images of yesterday’s shooting, even those images will fade and change in our minds.

Their over-use, permutation, and meme-ification will render them something very different a month, two months from now.

Trump will have a great week. Or at least great-ish. He’ll have his Lazarus moment on Thursday, when he accepts the Republican nomination for president. If we haven’t beforehand, on Thursday we should get a look at his ear and unless he’s hanging a chandelier earring from it, we’ll see that it was, in fact, not pierced last night.

Meaning, he was not shot. Reportedly, it was not a bullet that struck him but a shard of the same device he once used as a weapon against then-Pres. Barack Obama. “We have a teleprompter president,” Trump foreshadowed in 2015.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the teleprompter. This is the word on your screen, and the word is good.

Of course, Trump posted almost immediately that his ear was “pierced” by a bullet. It seems likely that he heard not just the shots but the whine of air unzipping as bullets whizzed by. But he does not, in fact, know what hit him.

And a bullet traveling about 2,000 miles per hour likely would have done considerably more damage to Trump’s ear than what was visible last night. I’d say we’ll find out, but I worry the relevant investigative authorities will be hesitant to contradict Trump’s story for fear of, well, you know.

Of course, it doesn’t matter whether it was bullet or shrapnel. But then, neither does the picture of Trump fist-pumping under a flag matter. And shit that doesn’t matter has a sad history of mattering a lot.

But Trump’s Lazarus moment won’t be all we get from the Republican National Convention. We’ll see how much of the fringe’s fringes the Republican National Committee allows on stage, and what they’ll say. We’re expected to learn Trump’s choice for vice president. Presumably someone large enough to stand behind.

Already, Trump has done what he does best: Issue mixed messaging that mixes chunks of aspirational unity into a pungently divisive broth. 

“In this moment,” he someone wrote, “it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Characters as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to win.”

Well, according to a witness, Evil got its head blown off last night, so what Evil is Trump talking about not letting win? Is it the same people he started the same freaking sentence saying we should Unite with?

What are we supposed to do with messaging that directs us simultaneously to unite and defeat Evil? When they speak of defeating Evil like that, how are Democrats supposed to respond when the shoe is off the other foot? Not like that.

Instead, we must fight harder than ever against autocracy and fascism and theocracy and misogyny and bigotry and hatred.

But the really hard thing we must do, for everyone’s sakes, is to stop attacking people. Hate the sin, not the sinner. Call out words and deeds, not personal essences. Reject “Evil” as a way of understanding behavior.

It’s hard!

We reach for the maximal language of condemnation to make clear our absolute opposition to the hatred or violence we’re opposing. And that leads us to condemn the person stupidly saying or doing it. The way Republicans dehumanize street criminals as “thugs” and “animals.”

Humans think in binary terms. Good persons/bad persons. And even in our lowest moments, we can’t resist hitting out at “the other side.”

When the family of Comperatore, the shooter’s lone fatality, posted a tribute to him today, it was interwoven with criticism of the media, pre-emptively claiming the media wouldn’t tell us things about him. Which, duh, obviously they’ll be all over the guy’s good qualities.

In fact, what they actually probably won’t focus on is one of Comperatore’s final Tweets. Responding to alleged satire claiming Trump would legalize running over bicyclists, he responded: “Deal!” That was two days before he was cut down by a bullet.

The point isn’t that justice was served over a dumb fucking Tweet about a dumber fucking article. The point is that he fucked up and we should still mourn him and love him as we love all our fellows: In their imperfect glory.

Google MLK quotes about love. It’s not weakness. It’s not condoning the tenets embraced by our political opponents. It’s how you win.

Which means the hard thing isn’t more calling out of bullshit, it’s less hate of the bullshitters. It’s active love. Yes, for people saying and doing and thinking shitty things. The more they and others see their rivals not hating, the harder it will be for them to hate.

Trump can, in theory, use this moment to elevate our common humanity, our common American-ness, whatever that is. But we don’t need him to. Because we can do it without him. In fact, he alone can’t fix it. We together can.

TCB

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