When a 20-year-old man shot and nearly killed Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Americans by and large were shocked but not necessarily surprised.
What motivated Thomas Crooks to clamber atop a roof with a high-powered rifle and attempt to assassinate the former president remains a subject of police investigation. Yet the wider atmosphere in which Crooks acted has become dreadfully familiar.
It is one in which partisans wage increasingly bitter rhetorical combat, perceiving the other side to be less than human and the stakes to be existential. It rages on social media, across a new generation of media outlets and even at local school board and town hall meetings where the stakes would typically seem to be less than life-or-death.
One of the few traces of common ground that remains in a polarised nation is the sense that each new low will be followed by something worse, and that violence is the eventual endpoint.
“The curious aspect of our times is that we seem to be imploding when nothing would precipitate this degree of crisis,” said Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School, who has written extensively on the tumult of American life in the 1960s.
Then, the country was reeling from a foreign war, a youth revolt and political assassinations. Now, Varon observed, the economy was roaring, the stock market kept hitting new highs and the nation was otherwise at peace.
“It’s a mood of intense foreboding,” Varon said, calling the attempted assassination “eminently predictable”.
Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, described the US as “an agitated, irritated country right now” and warned of worse to come. He was backed by a Marist poll, published in April, which found that one in five Americans believed violence might be necessary to put the nation back on track.
As they contemplated the unthinkable — what would have happened if Trump had been killed — political leaders appealed for calm on Sunday. “This is a moment where all of us have a responsibility to take down the temperature,” said Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, a vital swing state. He was echoed hours later by President Joe Biden in an address from the Oval Office.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, ordered its staff to refrain from commenting on social media about Saturday’s shooting to avoid worsening the situation.
But many were also pointing fingers and apportioning blame. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the conservative activist and writer, blamed the left and its allies in the media for turning Trump into a “Hitler-level threat” over a period of years, in turn justifying any means to stop him.
“We should not be surprised, then, at what happened yesterday. It was the inevitable result of years of vitriolic, sustained demonisation,” she wrote on Sunday.
Even before Saturday’s assassination attempt, the nation was already on edge. For the past two weeks, Biden’s candidacy in this year’s presidential race was on death watch as angry Democrats plotted to oust him following a disastrous debate performance that crystallised doubts about his age and mental fitness.
The nation has endured the spectacle of a former president in civil and criminals trials that brought predictions of widespread violence. Although the worst was avoided, one conspiracy theorist from Florida self-immolated just outside a Manhattan courthouse in April.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision about presidential immunity deepened concerns among many that America’s democracy was eroding.
Meanwhile, university campuses and public spaces have been gripped for months by pro-Palestinian protests that have, at times, stirred violence and renewed antisemitism that many believed had been vanquished.
Still to come are the Republican party convention, starting on Monday, and the Democratic convention in August — and then what has, once again, been described as an all-or-nothing election in November.
“This is all occurring in one year,” said Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor. “There’s nobody who can avoid being attentive to politics in this day.”
For many critics of Trump, this era of rhetorical violence was ushered in by him, when he descended an escalator at his Manhattan tower nearly a decade ago and formally joined the political arena. He kicked off his campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and then, infamously, declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” after a torch-bearing, rightwing mob shouting antisemitic slurs marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
His Maga movement has been accompanied by a new generation of legislators, including Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who brandish firearms and joke about targeting socialists.
To his opponents, that culture and rhetoric culminated in the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol, which Trump had fanned by issuing unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and pleas for his supporters to “fight”.
Biden entered the White House four years ago with a promise to restore decency and civility. But that has not panned out.
As Ali observed, many Trump supporters remain convinced that the left could never accept Trump’s victory in 2016 and so set about trying to delegitimise him, including by caricaturing him as a monster and would-be dictator. That has not made Maga supporters receptive to Biden’s appeals for comity.
Meanwhile, the nation has become inured to acts of political violence that had previously seemed unimaginable. Among them was the attack two years ago on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by a hammer-wielding man who had broken into their San Francisco home.
The attacker told police he had been targeting the Speaker, a powerful Democrat who has become a hated figure on the right, and was carrying zip ties, a rope and tape.
The attack bore resemblance to a plot two years earlier by a group of rightwing militia members in Michigan to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
With less than four months remaining in what both sides sometimes say is an existential election for the country, there is little reason to believe that the atmosphere will ease.
Trump’s stump speeches have regularly warned supporters that they are on the brink of losing their country to a group of violent socialists — and that was before he was shot.
As his own campaign has sputtered, a frail Biden has attempted to generate energy by shifting the focus back to warnings about the threat posed by Trump.
“Americans want a president, not a dictator,” Biden said on Friday, a day before the shooting, at a rally in Detroit. His supporters have erected billboards in key battleground states that warn of “Trump’s plan to be a dictator on Day 1”.
Even as Trump and Biden turned to a new message of unity and cooler heads, Varon was among those doubting that America had seen an end to its dark political discourse.
“Both sides have incentive to continue to demonise their adversary,” he said.
Read the full article here
