In Brief:
Most elected officials reacted to Saturday’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump with sobriety. The typical statement thanked law enforcement for its response and prayed for the safety of Trump and the other people at his Pennsylvania rally. Politicians across the political spectrum, from California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said that political violence does not belong in a democracy.
"There's no place in America for this kind of violence," President Biden said Saturday. "It's sick. It's sick. That's one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. You cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this."
Social media and cable coverage, however, immediately made it clear that the deadly attempt on Trump’s life would not be a shared occasion for grief and outrage, but rather an excuse for people to be angered along familiar and much-practiced lines. While elected officials mostly sang from the same book, others dissolved into the usual partisan disharmonies, with people on either side ascribing the worst possible motives to their opponents.
Some Republicans sought to lay the blame for the incident on hostile Democratic rhetoric against Trump, including a remark Biden had made a few days earlier saying it was time to “put Trump in a bullseye.”
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a top potential Trump pick as running mate, wrote on Saturday. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
After posting that the last thing America needed was “sympathy for the devil,” Colorado Democratic state Rep. Scott Woodrow not only deleted the tweet but his entire account on the social media site X. Many on the left, however, kept up the barrage of criticism regarding Trump and his policies, as well as the reactions of his supporters to the shooting.
“Live your life in such a way that the entire world isn't ready to throw a party when you get shot,” wrote an X account temporarily named “I Smoked The Staged Trump Assassination.”
That post has been viewed a half-million times. With terms such as “staged” and “fake” trending immediately after the shooting, political commentator Ian Bremmer noted them as a “critical sign of a democracy in crisis,” predicting that Saturday’s event presages more violence and instability to come.
“A spirit of vengeance is haunting America,” wrote Financial Times columnist Edward Luce. “Violence was already implicit in much of the rhetoric. Now it is explicit.”
Not Coming Together
This is not an era when Americans come together around tragic political events. Under any set of circumstances, many are willing to view each other as cartoon villains.
Although members of Congress from both parties stood together on the Capitol steps on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, to sing “God Bless America,” that spirit of unity quickly faded. At no point was this weekend a time of calm or healing.
When I’ve written about political violence and threats in recent years, the general response from readers has been what-aboutism — what about the bad acts perpetrated by the other side? Rarely does anyone say what people like Newsom and McConnell said Saturday, that violence of any kind from any quarter has no place in our politics. By contract, polls have shown increasing support for political violence, although far more people are worried about it and of course most people will not engage in it themselves.
On Sunday, Andy Kim, a member of Congress from New Jersey and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, offered a reminder that when Abraham Lincoln was shot, he was wearing a coat embroidered with the words “One Country, One Destiny.”
We have failed in recent difficult moments to unify and instead allowed our divisions to grow, Kim notes. But Americans need not in this moment choose a path toward retribution, recrimination and reprisal.
“Choosing to unite instead of incite does not mean we dismiss the magnitude of our differences,” Kim wrote. “But it compels us to be cautious and precise about our next steps, our words, and our actions in this unbelievably precarious moment.”
When I interviewed Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox about his “disagree better” initiative, his attempt to convince Americans to air their differences without resorting to hatred or violence, he had this to say: “It ends one of two ways: Either we collectively decide that we’re not going to hate our fellow Americans, or we start shooting each other. And that, sadly, is the path we are headed on right now.”
Blaming Biden
Over the weekend, many Republicans blamed Democrats for the shooting due to their frequent comparisons of Trump to Adolf Hitler. And Vance was not the only Republican who sought to lay blame for the shooting directly at Biden’s feet.
“Joe Biden sent the orders,” posted Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia. “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” he wrote in another post.
Others criticized Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson and other congressional Democrats who had called for Trump’s Secret Service protection to be suspended in light of his criminal conviction. Some said they never wanted to hear about Jan. 6 again, or sought to frame any form of criticism of Trump as inciting violence against him.
On Saturday, the Biden campaign quickly announced it would suspend its campaign ads and communications, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Scott Jennings, a Republican political consultant and regular CNN contributor, who called it a “disgrace” that Biden hadn’t taken down a comment from June calling Trump “a genuine threat to the nation.”
Democratic Concerns
The fact that Republicans were hailing Trump as heroic and castigating Democratic rhetoric led some Democrats to conclude the incident will be used as an attempt to clamp down on dissenting voices, particularly if Trump is elected in November. There were plenty of comparisons to the Reichstag fire of 1933, an event that Hitler used as an excuse to end constitutional protections and assume dictatorial powers.
From the left, mainly there were complaints that the Republican response was inconsistent with GOP reaction to other events. There was a lot of complaint that Republicans valorized Trump after not reacting with similar horror to high-profile school shootings. And Trump himself was criticized for having mocked the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband of former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi herself released a gracious statement, saying she thanked God that Trump was safe. For far too many Americans, however, the shooter’s near miss of a former president, the man currently favored to win the next election, did not trigger either horror or relief, but an odd brew of cheering and dismay.
A majority of Americans no longer believe that elections can solve the nation’s most pressing problems, at least according to a survey released last month by the University of Chicago. For many, politics now is not a way to resolve differences, but to amplify them.
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