Member-only story
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.
When news first broke, I was skeptical. The way that the right-wing media ecosystem and its pundits were playing up the idea that the left wing had weaponized federal law enforcement and that a Republican electoral victory would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” an assassination attempt on Trump seemed a little too perfect. Details of the shooting were still vague and didn’t include the casualties. I’d decided that, until the bullet was found, I would consider it staged, and entertained the possibility that it was a false flag operation.
It’s clear now that both reactions were wrong.
This was a legitimate assassination attempt. People were hurt. Someone died. Not living in the Right Wing Alternative Reality, I don’t believe that crisis actors exist and are willing to be killed.
I’m also convinced that it wasn’t a false flag operation done by a Trump supporter who wanted to give the right wing justification to escalate things further: The shot was too…
