Talk About Escalation!
The predictable fallout from a stunning assassination attempt
Saturday evening, a 20-year old gunman tried to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally. The bullets grazed the former president’s ear, seriously hurt two rally-goers, and killed another one.
The incident (which created this incredible marked-up photo) affirms the fears that the right wing media ecosystem has been teaching to its voting base, and the predictable response from prominent Republicans is only going to make things even worse.
This Was a Legitimate Escalation
This newsletter has covered escalations before. They are “the cyclical conduct between competing societal factions that can spiral out of control as each one retaliates against the other for real or perceived slights”:
An attempted political assassination is about as significant of an escalation as you can get, and it sure seems like this was a real attempted assassination.
