This piece will be appearing in newspapers this week in the mostly rural Virginia region in which I live.
This piece has some of the same ideas presented in the video I made with the DK audience in mind,. But for the newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06), I frame it with an emphasis on a different point: excessive attention to an unsuccessful assassination attempt, increases the danger of such political violence spreading by contagion. (The Copycat phenomenon.) It also ends with a kind of admonition to regular Republicans who are giving this attack on Trump a weighty political meaning it doesn’t warrant.
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History shows that assassinations are among those that can spread through contagion.
(The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 led into a decade of consequential assassinations: like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and George Wallace in 1972.)
The more attention is paid to any one incident, the more likely it will become contagious, as the idea germinates in the minds of susceptible people that they, too, can take such action and get such attention.
For that reason, a wise society will not give any such incident any more importance than it warrants.
Certainly, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is a story people should know about. But how important is it?
The importance of a news development should be assessed according to these two criteria:
- Does it tell us something important we don’t already know? And
- Does it change our situation in any important way?
Clearly, that attempt on Trump’s life would have been hugely important if it had been successful.
- Donald Trump is a leadership figure of possibly unprecedented importance on the American political scene. His command of a significant following – intensity of loyalty -- is unlike anything ever witnessed in American history.
- His impact on American civilization – already, and with potentially much more in the future -- has been transformative in ways never matched by any previous American leader.
If the assassin’s bullet had eliminated Donald Trump, the entire political battle would be thrown into uncertainty. The Republicans would have had to come up with a new standard-bearer overnight, and the Democrats would have had to overhaul in major ways their purpose and message in the presidential campaign.
America’s allies across the world would let go of a great deal of tension regarding their own future security.
Huge! Hard to remember a more important story.
But the present incident is only an attempted assassination. How important is that?
1) Does it tell us anything we don’t know?
- It tells us that among our third of a billion population, we’ve got some individuals who for reasons of their own go off the deep end and inflict violent destruction upon the American order. We knew that.
- It tells us that a lot of people have access to guns – and AR-15s in particular -- that it would be better for us all for them not to have. We knew that, too.
- It suggests that this is a time of great political tension in the country, and that political violence has become more of a threat than it has been. That’s no news either, as all the discussion of “Gag Orders” against Trump’s own incitements clearly showed.
- Since people intending to assassinate an American president show up all the time (though few get all the way to having such a shot at him), this attempt doesn’t change our understanding that it’s important to have an effective Secret Service to keep assassination from governing the American political path.
- It reminds us that political violence is antithetical to the fundamental American value of the Rule of Law, and – as we knew-- must therefore be rejected.
The world looks the same to me.
2) Does it change our situation? No. (Not unless we magnify it.) After Donald Trump survived that assault with only a superficial wound, the whole contest of which he is such a vital part was exactly what it had been the day before.
As human beings, we extend our sympathy to another human being who has been wounded – and perhaps traumatized – by this incident.
But we shouldn’t make it an unnecessarilybig deal-- and thereby maybe inspire some Copycat who pictures himself a figure in history, like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald.
I fault the media, for one thing. The job of the media should be to tell the people what they most need to know about the world so they can exercise good judgment as citizens.
(That would mean telling people a lot more about the meaning of such “incidents” as an unprecedented hurricane arising that tells us a whole lot about the gathering threat of climate change, and about the significance of a Supreme Court decision that somehow held that our Constitution requires that the most powerful person in the country get nearly a free pass to violate the law.)
But instead, especially cable news stops everything to give wall-to-wall coverage of the story of an attack that injured the ear of a presidential candidate. As it does to every major event that supplies them dramatic videos – tornadoes, school shootings, terrorist bombings – that will get them eyeballs, and therefore dollars.
I also fault the Republican politicians who have seized upon this should-be relatively inconsequential story for combative political purposes.
(Like a Republican congressman who calls upon the Pennsylvania prosecutor to charge President Biden for “inciting” this assassination attempt, followed by Trump’s running mate -- JD Vance -- also blaming Biden.)
Regular Republicans should ask themselves, “Would anything be different if it had been Biden whose ear was grazed—different in any way that would justify a citizen giving different political weight to the one scenario one wouldn’t give to the other?” And recognize that the answer is “No.”
I’d say, let us give thanks that this was not a very important event, and focus our attention on the nature of the task we face as the people of a troubled country.