Staring Into The Abyss
An international news outlet (the British Broadcasting Company) says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. Well, they're half right. You can make an argument that there does seem to be a ‘new normal’ here, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.
There’s a not so subtle reluctance in the mainstream media today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonize over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in the other day's craziness was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarization’. Other news outlets say it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.
Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the United States. Even friends of mine who, like me, are supporters of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, feel a tad uncomfortable that idiots can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and casually head up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarization’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarization) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.
There’s a not so subtle reluctance in the mainstream media today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonize over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in the other day's craziness was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarization’. Other news outlets say it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.
Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the United States. Even friends of mine who, like me, are supporters of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, feel a tad uncomfortable that idiots can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and casually head up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarization’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarization) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.
Now, I have to be honest with you. When I first heard the phrase 'Trump Derangement Syndrome', I thought it was a major newspaper having some fun. And to be fair, I am on record describing Mr. Trump as an odious, juvenile delinquent of a human being who no sane person would elect dog-catcher. But then I started looking around at friends and family and listening to their utter contempt and hatred for the man, and I said, "Holy shit! Trump Derangement Syndrome! It does exist!" But I digress...
That there have been two suspected efforts to murder one of the candidates in the presidential election is unbelievably extraordinary and unprecedented. "There’s no political playbook for how to deal with another apparent assassination attempt against a major-party presidential candidate within weeks of an election", says Stephen Collinson at CNN. Platitudes about ‘gun culture’ and ‘culture wars’ are an outright betrayal of the gravity of the situation, of this unique, and uniquely unsettling, moment in the life of our republic where a candidate for the highest office has come close to being murdered...TWICE.
The second alleged attempt took place at Trump’s private golf club in West Palm Beach the other day (I could be really snarky here and say something like, “If a man can’t be safe at his own private golf club…THAT HE OWNS…then the republic is surely doomed). Secret-service agents spied the barrel of a rifle poking through bushes around 300 to 500 yards from where Trump was golfing. They pursued the alleged would-be assassin and arrested him. It was one Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old from North Carolina with firm political beliefs, some of them quite eccentric. This follows the shooting of Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Trump’s ear was grazed. Had he not been turning his head at the time, he might be dead.
People are pouring over Routh’s voting habits and social-media history in search of a motive. But he’s hard to pin down. He is super pro-Ukraine. He once said "we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground". So perhaps he was aggrieved with Trump’s insistence that we need a compromise between Russia and Ukraine in order to bring that awful war to a close. He also seems Israelophobic. He questioned Jews' claims to the land of Israel, sharing a map of the region with the words: "It seems to historically all be Palestinian." So maybe he hated Trump's pro-Israel stance. It seems he was a Trump supporter once, but he later lost faith, damning Trump as an ‘idiot’, a ‘buffoon’, a ‘fool’ and a threat to democracy. "DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose", he said in a post on X earlier this year in which he tagged Joe Biden.
Some Republicans and right-wing talking heads are citing all this stuff as proof that the Dems and their cheerleaders in the liberal media have whipped up a psychotic level of animus for Trump. After all, Routh’s outpourings sound familiar, right? ‘Democracy is on the ballot’ – say that at a New York Times soiree and 20 people will clink your glass in vivid agreement. I’m not comfortable with this argument. Even as someone concerned about the chattering classes’ Trump Derangement Syndrome, I find the drawing of a direct line between progressive rhetoric and a gunman’s violence cynical. And censorious. ‘Unless Kamala tones down her barbs, someone will get hurt’ – that’s the blackmailing undertone to this rush to pin the blame for violence on words.
It also feels too easy. Just as those who are fretting over gun culture and polarization seem incapable of grappling with the seriousness of what’s happening, so those who say ‘IT’S ALL CNN’S FAULT’ clearly prefer pat explanations as opposed to deep thought and discussion. The idea that Kamala calling Trump a rude name might make an idiot want to kill him is as dumb as saying that owning an AK-47 is the logical first step to wanting to kill a presidential candidate. In both scenarios, too many steps are missed and too much nuance is discarded. Too much of the depth of the moral and political crisis afflicting our country – and much of the West – is sacrificed at the altar of scoring a quick point against your opponents on the back of horrific violence.
That there have been two suspected efforts to murder one of the candidates in the presidential election is unbelievably extraordinary and unprecedented. "There’s no political playbook for how to deal with another apparent assassination attempt against a major-party presidential candidate within weeks of an election", says Stephen Collinson at CNN. Platitudes about ‘gun culture’ and ‘culture wars’ are an outright betrayal of the gravity of the situation, of this unique, and uniquely unsettling, moment in the life of our republic where a candidate for the highest office has come close to being murdered...TWICE.
The second alleged attempt took place at Trump’s private golf club in West Palm Beach the other day (I could be really snarky here and say something like, “If a man can’t be safe at his own private golf club…THAT HE OWNS…then the republic is surely doomed). Secret-service agents spied the barrel of a rifle poking through bushes around 300 to 500 yards from where Trump was golfing. They pursued the alleged would-be assassin and arrested him. It was one Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old from North Carolina with firm political beliefs, some of them quite eccentric. This follows the shooting of Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Trump’s ear was grazed. Had he not been turning his head at the time, he might be dead.
People are pouring over Routh’s voting habits and social-media history in search of a motive. But he’s hard to pin down. He is super pro-Ukraine. He once said "we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground". So perhaps he was aggrieved with Trump’s insistence that we need a compromise between Russia and Ukraine in order to bring that awful war to a close. He also seems Israelophobic. He questioned Jews' claims to the land of Israel, sharing a map of the region with the words: "It seems to historically all be Palestinian." So maybe he hated Trump's pro-Israel stance. It seems he was a Trump supporter once, but he later lost faith, damning Trump as an ‘idiot’, a ‘buffoon’, a ‘fool’ and a threat to democracy. "DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose", he said in a post on X earlier this year in which he tagged Joe Biden.
Some Republicans and right-wing talking heads are citing all this stuff as proof that the Dems and their cheerleaders in the liberal media have whipped up a psychotic level of animus for Trump. After all, Routh’s outpourings sound familiar, right? ‘Democracy is on the ballot’ – say that at a New York Times soiree and 20 people will clink your glass in vivid agreement. I’m not comfortable with this argument. Even as someone concerned about the chattering classes’ Trump Derangement Syndrome, I find the drawing of a direct line between progressive rhetoric and a gunman’s violence cynical. And censorious. ‘Unless Kamala tones down her barbs, someone will get hurt’ – that’s the blackmailing undertone to this rush to pin the blame for violence on words.
It also feels too easy. Just as those who are fretting over gun culture and polarization seem incapable of grappling with the seriousness of what’s happening, so those who say ‘IT’S ALL CNN’S FAULT’ clearly prefer pat explanations as opposed to deep thought and discussion. The idea that Kamala calling Trump a rude name might make an idiot want to kill him is as dumb as saying that owning an AK-47 is the logical first step to wanting to kill a presidential candidate. In both scenarios, too many steps are missed and too much nuance is discarded. Too much of the depth of the moral and political crisis afflicting our country – and much of the West – is sacrificed at the altar of scoring a quick point against your opponents on the back of horrific violence.
I mean, is this where we are now? We’re some third-world country with a revolving door of dictators who come to power at the end of a gun barrel? Hell, I was all worried that we were becoming Nazi Germany when Jewish students at our so-called elite institutions of higher learning felt like they were going to be herded into camps by the proto-Nazis who were taking up the cause of Hitler's Final Solution. It strikes me that the boiling hatred for Trump, which has now expressed itself in two dreadful, almost murderous events, speaks to a culture whose roots are deeper than we know, and more difficult to discern than we would like. It’s a culture of simmering intolerance and hate (sometimes of the dumbest kind), a culture of grievance, a culture where one expresses one’s angst less through the old civilized norms of discussion and disagreement than through the wail and childish whining of implacable rage and the instinct to destroy that which offends you. Is it possible the attempted assassinations of Trump are not really ideological acts, like the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but rather are the militant wing of our noxious and anti-intellectual cancel culture? An apocalyptic expression of something that is now almost mundane: high society’s burning hostility to that which deviates from the narrative of correct-think? Perhaps the unprecedented double attempt on the life of a presidential candidate feels both alien and familiar because it is shocking but also… not shocking. Right?
It bears repeating: We have now had TWO assassination attempts on a person running for the highest office in the land. And what really bothers/worries/annoys me is that a good portion of the country just shrugs their shoulders. Are they okay with this type of behavior? Is this they way they want elections decided...looking down the barrel of a gun? Or is their visceral hatred of the guy so complete that the ends (his removal not only from public life, but from life, period) justify any means (political murder)?
Ladies and Gentlemen, it seems we are entering new and frightening territory that very well may be self-inflicted. And when we stare into that abyss, we might not like what stares back.
write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com
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