We Must Step Back From The Brink
Yesterday, Former President Donald J. Trump was shot during an attempted assassination during one of his campaign trail rallies.
Details surrounding the incident are still coming out with the facts beginning to settle as investigations continue. So far it seems to be the case that there were 2 casualties, the shooter — currently identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks — who was killed by the secret service after he opened fire, and one of the attendees of the rally — 50-year-old Corey Comperatore who was a volunteer firefighter and reportedly died while attempting to shield his family from the shots.
2 other rally attendees were also reportedly critically injured, and Trump — who’s ear was pierced by one of the bullets — was quickly rushed to a nearby hospital. He was later announced to be “fine” by his campaign and thanked the secret service and local authorities for their “rapid response” in a Truth Social post.
The event was met with a turbulent mixture of emotion across social media. Some users were horrified, some joked about the shooter missing, some claimed it was staged, some claimed President Biden had ordered it, and some took a celebratory tone — claiming that this was likely the moment in which a win for Trump in the upcoming election solidified.
The widespread images of Trump in the aftermath of the shooting — fist pumping in the air with the U.S. flag flowing in the background — will likely serve as a rallying point for his base, with presidential historians such as Douglas Brinkley suggesting that images like it would replace any sullen perceptions of the President as a felon with a new perception of him as “the wounded martyr of Butler, Pennsylvania.”
For me, the event represents a poignant sign of how truly severe and volatile the degradation of our democratic order has become. It was the first shooting of a current or former president since Ronald Reagan in 1981, and one that exemplifies the work that must be done by all of us collectively to escape the current climate of extremity.
Trump himself has played no small part in the facilitation of said climate. He has consistently and constantly undermined our foundational institutions, promoted political division, thrown away political norm after political norm, and engaged in conduct — such as the fake elector’s scheme— that I would argue ought to disqualify reasonable minds from ever considering him as an option for the presidency.
There has been much talk from conservatives across social media about how the shooting was a predictable result of irresponsible rhetoric among Democrats and liberal outlets which have called Trump a fascist, threat to democracy, or an existential threat.
These criticisms would hit harder if many of the ones making them didn’t seem to be blind to the extremity of their own rhetoric in the other direction and had not engaged in such deplorable conduct in the aftermath of Paul Pelosi’s assault with a hammer in his home.
That same assault is yet another scenario where Trump made comments that played into the worst excesses of the discourse surrounding the incident:
- “How’s her husband doing by the way, anybody know? She’s against building a wall around our border even though she has a wall around her house! Which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”
- “Wow, it’s — weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks. Probably, you and I are better off not talking about it. The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out so it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out. I don’t know, you hear the same things I do”
Yet still, what I saw yesterday must be condemned in the strongest of terms. Celebrating such acts only leave us worse for wear in the long run.
Donald Trump ought to be rejected at the ballot box in accordance with our better democratic values, not removed from the race at the hands of gunman in an act of political violence likely to only further the already tragically large fissure within the minds of the American public.
There must be a balance struck between strongly and unapologetically calling out the dangers and anti-democratic conduct of individuals like Trump, and the strict adherence to principles that restrict such extreme acts of political violence to last resorts reserved for only the most dire of cases.
Many of the responses to the shooting from prominent Democrat figures serve as models for what that might look like:
More than that the effort must be made for bridges in communication to exist between the rapidly diverging sects present in this country, before a future boiling point makes what we all just bore witness to seem like a mere warm up in comparison.
However, that effort cannot be one-sided, it requires reciprocation. There are values worth fighting for, and if yesterday’s assassination attempt does anything, I hope it makes clear why it’s necessary for us collectively to have a vested interest in the democratic norms so often pushed to the side by Trump and his ilk.
We must step back from the brink, and it will take us all working together inch by inch to do so. For if we continue on this path what awaits us is a long, dark fall into the abyss.
It’s time to ask ourselves what we want the character of the nation to be? What type of conduct we ought to seek to be defined by? What values we ought to commit ourselves to?
I can only hope we come to an answer before it’s too late. If not, it will be each and every one of us who will have lost.
