Long before Saturday evening’s shooting at a rally for former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, America was already on edge. Maybe it’s because November’s election will be the first since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Maybe it’s because there’s been so much uncertainty about whether the two presumptive nominees would be on the ballot on Election Day — whether Trump’s indictments and convictions would render him ineligible and whether Biden would be replaced by another Democrat.
Long before Saturday evening’s shooting at a rally for presidential candidate Donald Trump, America was already on edge.
November’s election feels more consequential than any one presidential election should ever be. Polarization is off the charts. Supreme Court rulings seem unmoored from precedent — and the Constitution. And polls show that a shockingly high percentage of Americans think violence against one’s political adversaries is justified.
It was in that context Saturday afternoon that we saw Trump reach for his right ear and then duck behind the lectern. And we saw the Secret Service surround him and rush him off the stage. Trump said in a social media post that his upper ear was "pierced" by a bullet. The shooter and one spectator are dead. Two other spectators are wounded, according to the Secret Service.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris condemned the shooting. Biden, speaking from Delaware, said there was “no place in America for this kind of violence.”
“It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons we have to unite this country,” Biden said. “We cannot condone this.”
The shooter’s identity and motivations remain unknown. But we do know that Americans have had a serious knot in our stomachs for months now, if not for years, about the direction our country is going.
Such dread is likely to only grow stronger the closer we get to November.
Whatever facts emerge, we can count on a significant number of Americans discounting them. Some will discount them because they can’t conceive of something happening the way the evidence suggests that it happened. Others will discount them because they see an opportunity to exploit the event for political gain. In a social media post after Saturday’s event, Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., claimed that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Subsequently — contradicting his previous post — Collins declared that “the Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.”
Such dread is likely to only grow stronger the closer we get to November.
Such statements couldn’t have been more irresponsible or more dangerous. Again, a shocking number of Americans talk of civil wars and revolutions and claim that there is a righteousness to political violence. We don’t need lawmakers responding to an apparent assassination attempt on Trump by suggesting the leader of the opposing party is to blame.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana was one of several Republicans on Saturday who blamed Democrats for telling the public what’s at stake during the upcoming election. He tweeted, “For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.” Let’s hope he tells his colleague from Georgia that.
Scalise was my representative in Congress for years when he was shot in 2017 while practicing for that year’s congressional baseball game. I opposed (and continue to oppose) just about everything Scalise says. But I was mortified that someone who disagreed with his politics lay in wait for him and tried to murder him.
This may be nostalgia taking over, but there seems to have been an understanding six years ago that we need to eschew incendiary language in such moments and use cooler, more unifying rhetoric. But it seems naive now to even wish for such calls.
Beyond the hugely significant fact that someone may have tried to assassinate a political candidate, one of the reasons that Saturday’s shooting is so worrisome is that it seems almost guaranteed to lead to an even more dangerous political climate. And the climate already feels unsurvivable.