Up front, thank goodness the shooter missed, that Donald Trump turned at just the right time, or both. As some reading this remember well, or have come to know through their reading, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan has grown even scarier since March 30, 1981 thanks to historians like Steven Hayward. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan (Part II) indicates that but for a split second decision to take Reagan to George Washington University hospital, he would have died.
What’s important about the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981 was that hatred of Reagan at the time, and after, was vicious. If anyone doubts this, they need only visit the Reagan Center in Santa Barbara, CA. One of the exhibits is a long series of video clips with prominent faces in politics saying thoroughly awful things about Reagan. In short, the “national divide” or high “temperature” that allegedly defines the U.S. at present is hardly new, notwithstanding the myriad attempts by pundits to pretend in the last few days that “this time is different.” No, it’s not.
Yet the intense desire within the punditry to attach greater political meaning to everything means that the attempted assassination has and will take on political qualities. President Biden has predictably said “We must stand together,” and that we must “lower the temperature” in the U.S. today, as though a lack of unity between the opposing ideologies has anything to do with what happened. Except that it doesn’t. Really, are there enough 9s next to 99% in order to account for the percentage of politically passionate Americans who wouldn’t ever act in the way that the shooter did on Saturday, and who wouldn’t have acted in the way that John Hinckley Jr. did in 1981? Sorry, but Saturday’s near tragedy has everything to with the crazed nature of the individual shooter, and nothing to do with politics and the “temperature” of the United States. All the latter tells us is what we already know, that the pundit class thinks it’s all about the pundit class. At which point it’s not just Biden and his left wing handlers insulting the American people by pretending the attempted assassination was somehow related to our passions.
One routinely sanctimonious conservative asked, in response to the attempted assassination, if we “can hope for any improvement in our political culture.” Another claimed that the actions of a plainly deranged individual “changed everything” (they don’t even bother to be original anymore), and wondered if “it is enough to ease our political polarization.” According to the Manhattan Institute’s Seth Barron, ”the attempted assassination of Donald Trump marks the darkest descent yet in our toxic politics.” Oh really, compared to what? According to right-leaning legal pundit Jonathan Turley at The Hill, “the most shocking aspect [of the attempted assassination] was that it was not nearly as surprising as it should have been. For months, politicians, the press and pundits have escalated reckless rhetoric in this campaign on both sides.” It seems Turley, Barron et al want us to believe as Biden does that the “we” (the American people) can’t be trusted, that we’re easily susceptible to wild-eyed reaction after reading, listening to and watching people in politics, and those who write about them at prominent locales of opinion, including The Hill. They’re insulting you.
To be fair, more than a few on the left have responded as hysterics on the right have. Also at The Hill, lefty sportswriter James Zirin blamed Trump for nearly being killed since Trump was “long comfortable with political violence.” And then as members of the right have been pointing out en masse since the shooting, members of the left have been predicting for years that Trump’s rhetoric would lead to something horrible like what happened in Butler, PA.
Which should give reasonable, small c conservative members of the right-wing commentariat the chance to lament what happened in sober fashion, all the while attaching no bigger meaning to it given their correct view that people, not guns, kill. Except that doing so would mean that conservatives would let a crisis go to waste. No chance, it seems. Were they conservative, or even mildly reasonable, pundits on the right would point out that only very unwell people who are thankfully very rare, attempt murder.
Lest conservatives forget, it was they who properly blanched at “hate crime” laws given their belief that defining heinous acts like murder or attempted murder with “hate” is a redundancy. Precisely. But since the attempted murder nearly took one of their own, suddenly there’s a problem inside the Democratic fringe or the people more broadly that would lead to attempted murder, or the real thing. No, once again. Crazy people do crazy things.
Not asked enough since Saturday, is what on earth the alleged “national divide” or “temperature” has to do with what happened in the first place. Of course, if it were asked then the story would shift away from politicians and pundits, and on to the real story: bad, unhinged people can and will do bad things, period. The problem with such a comment is that it disallows the politicization of everything that is the interchangeable instinct within the political class.
Which means that even the attempted assassination of Trump has to take on political qualities. Think all the gracious Tweets about Trump from Democrats, calls to Trump, etc. About them, it goes without saying that none wanted Trump dead for so many reasons, including – yes – political ones (sorry, but death becomes the dead), but do the Dem pols who found it within them (or their handlers) to be gracious about and toward Trump really think we’re stupid? The grace expressed and revealed has been PR, plain and simple, much as it would have been PR from Republicans if it were Biden who had been the victim of an attempted assassination.
Assuming it had been Biden who was shot at and inches from being killed, Republicans are naturally pointing out that Democrats would be loudly blaming Republican rhetoric for what had taken place. Yes, that’s all true, but are Republicans so bereft of serious thought or action that they’ll now let the always emotive-about-everything left benchmark their actions? The question sadly answers itself, in which case Republicans are lamenting the rhetoric of the Democrats (Republican blogger Christopher Tremoglie castigated Biden at the Washington Examiner for saying “just days” before the assassination attempt that he wanted to put Trump in a “bull’s eye”) as the alleged cause of their man nearly being assassinated even though they would correctly say a similar tragedy befalling Biden would have nothing to do with their rhetoric. Words are just words, after which we’re not killers or would-be killers because of politics.
Another blogger at the Examiner asserted that Trump’s near assassination meant we were “just inches from Civil War.” To refer to such absurdity as real, that Americans were going to take up arms (whether verbal or real) over all this is just silly. To say it’s irresponsible is to insult the American people in the way that the pundits on both sides are prone to do, but seriously…civil war?
It goes on and on. Another pundit speculated that the shooter’s tragically crazed ways were a function of the lockdowns foisted on us by nailbiting politicians, including Trump, and the time the shooter missed in school. About this, the lockdowns were thoroughly, shamefully mindless, but there’s once again that not enough 9s problem next to 99%: most young people kept from school weren’t, and cannot be killers. Too bad pundits can’t understand this, or won’t understand this in an effort to make everything all about the importance of them and what they’re saying now. The problem is that what they’re saying now (the American people can’t be trusted to be exposed to passionate debate without killing each other) has nothing to do with the sad fact that there are quite simply some crazy people out there, nothing more.
Republished from RealClear Markets
