Not Much Room for Decency and Calm
Jeff Flake, Val Venis, and enlightenment at the downtown Phoenix Carl’s Jr.
The day following Trump’s rally, I talked to Senator Jeff Flake on the phone. I was still in Phoenix, and he was elsewhere in Arizona, and we were talking about decency in American life and American politics when he brought up the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise. “I worry that too many good people are turning away from politics when they see the vitriol that is on display,” he said. “One of the most stark examples is the baseball practice in June. All of the sudden, bullets are being fired at the field. I just remember thinking, ‘Why us? Who could look at a bunch of middle-aged members of Congress playing baseball and see the enemy?’”
It speaks to the relentless and multidirectional chaos of our nation under Trump that I had forgotten about the shooting, which happened on June 13, only nine weeks before Phoenix. And it had not registered with me that Senator Flake had been there. I apologized to him.
“It’s obviously not something that happens every day,” he said.
We should pause here and note that the senator and I were calmly, dispassionately talking about an incident wherein a gunman named James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on a baseball practice Republicans were holding in…
