Trump’s shooting is a legacy of America’s violent past

By Timothy L. O'Brien

Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, fortunately, on Saturday evening. The brutality and immediacy of the shooting were very specific to our digital age. Video of the calamity enveloping the presidential candidate at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, raced across mobile phones, social media platforms and TV screens shortly after shots were fired.

Eyewitness accounts, specific and harrowing, soon followed.

The violence played out in real time on screens nestled in palms or beamed from flat-panel displays. And the anarchy and misery of the experience sits on the opposite side of a communications chasm from the failed attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan 43 years ago, which relied on old-school TV, radio and newspapers for word to circulate. In that regard, the Trump shooting is even further removed from John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; further still, of course, from Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865.

America’s political and social fractures are so constant, thanks to the ubiquity of social media and the eternal disappointments of human nature, that it’s tempting to say that the US now occupies distinctly untested territory.

“The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, 115 days before Election Day has ushered in a dark new chapter of political violence,” Axios’s Zachary Basu noted.

However much Americans may want to see an assassination attempt and other jarring dislocations of the Trump era as hallmarks of something new and unexpected, that’s not really true. The US has been a violent country since its founding, often cataclysmically so.

The nation expanded on the back of slavery and genocide, endured a searing civil war and various territorial battles to secure its future, has been home to brutal eccentrics and cults and has routinely tolerated measures of racial and gun violence that to this day test civic and moral boundaries.

Assassinations pop up too, scarring the historical record. The arc of brutality connecting the Civil War era to the Trump era is more direct than the communication and technological gaps separating them suggest.

It certainly isn’t the only thing defining a country as complex, promising and dynamic as the US. Tightly knit communities and families, rich diversity and vast reservoirs of freedom and opportunity stand out, too. But violence isn’t a bug inside the American experiment. It’s a feature. And it’s been with us for a very long time. The tragedy that ensnared the former president and a bystander who died on Saturday is an outcome of a history of savagery, and not a recently hatched novelty.

So what do we want to do about that?

Avoiding incendiary rhetoric and physical threats, ending the gun plague, electing public servants who embrace common ground rather than division, and buttressing democracy and public safety are all starting points. Call me old-fashioned, but I hope that most people don’t want to remain mired in cycles of violence. I also hope they’ll ultimately reject electoral dynamics that fetishize these actions.

One prominent person who could set an example by choosing a path away from violence and division is Trump himself. The challenge he faces, however, is that he has spent the better part of the last nine years deploying violent rhetoric as one of the glues binding his coalition together.

Yes, yes, there’s been lots of well-meaning but vacuous observations in the wake of the Trump shooting that “both sides” have toyed dangerously with inciteful political rhetoric. Democrats and Republicans are both doing it, the argument goes, and if they both stop the country might reach the promised land. It’s a convenient construct. It’s also not true.

There isn’t a single Democratic leader with the stature and influence of Trump who has come remotely close to playing with the kind of fire he does. Not one.

Trump incited the violence that swamped the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He began making appeals to violence and upheaval almost as soon as he traveled down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his first successful presidential bid. They’ve been features of his rallies, his speeches, his social media output and his presidency.

In March he posted a short video on his social media platform of Joe Biden hogtied and held hostage in the back of a pickup truck. He has regularly targeted judges, prosecutors and some of their family members to contest the raft of lawsuits that have engulfed him.

On occasion, he’s taken the higher ground. “Hate has no place in our country and we’re going to take care of it,” he said in 2019 after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. “Condolences to all. We have to get it stopped. This has been going on for years. For years and years in our country, and we have to get it stopped.” But he didn’t “get it stopped.” Mass shootings continue to be a common part of American life.

Trump might have also risen to the occasion when a far-right conspiracy theorist attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer in their San Francisco home two years ago. During a speech last year he joked about the incident, drawing laughs by making light of security at the Pelosis’ home and mocking Paul Pelosi’s recovery from the attack. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., who has posted photos of himself holding a semi-automatic rifle bearing Hillary Clinton’s image, also made light of the Pelosi attack.

For her part, Pelosi had this to say shortly after Trump was shot on Saturday: “As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe.”

Republicans have made much of the fact that Biden told campaign donors several days before the Trump shooting that it was “time to put Trump in the bullseye.” Biden was inviting someone to shoot Trump, they say. Some of them, including vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance, have also said that Biden’s critique of Trump as an authoritarian-in-waiting also led to Saturday’s violence.

“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance noted in a social media post. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.”

Framing the problem that way is politically useful for Vance and other MAGA-teers in the GOP. Trump, who has said he wouldn’t mind being a dictator for a day, can’t be called an authoritarian because that might lead to his assassination. Meanwhile, Biden’s long political career has never involved trafficking in violent rhetoric à la Trump and he was quick to offer support and sympathy for his political rival.

“I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well,” Biden said shortly after the shooting. “I’m praying for him and his family.”

Biden had other thoughts to share as well. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It's sick. It's sick,” he said. “It is one of the reasons we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

That’s just about where any sensible person interested in public healing might want to be. It’s a vision for comity that Trump might want to approximate. Perhaps his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president in Milwaukee this week will contain more than traces of that thinking. But he has yet to respond in kind to Biden’s well wishes. He has, though, posted images of his face atop Mount Rushmore and Jesus Christ placing his hands on his shoulders after the shooting.

However he winds up conducting himself, Trump has already provided at least one great service. His rhetoric and his aspirations have stripped away some of the myths Americans tell themselves about their history, one another, and the legacy of violence that still haunts the country. And if he’s not ready to bridge the gaps he has helped open, maybe there are other Republicans and Democrats who are.