Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
Donald Trump is helped off the stage by Secret Service agents at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
One of the best books I’ve read this decade was called Break It Up, by Richard Kreitner, which reframes American history as a history of perpetual disunion that, practically from the founding, has been on the verge of cracking apart. In fact, it did break apart under the Articles of Confederation, after 4,000 Massachusetts rebels nearly took over the Springfield Armory and the federal government realized it had no means to stop it. (We sing the praises of our Constitution and only stage-whisper that it was our second attempt.) And it broke apart at Fort Sumter, triggering four years of civil war that in Kreitner’s retelling were more a culmination of events since the Revolution than anything out of character.
The assassination attempt on Donald Trump yesterday adds another data point in Kreitner’s favor, another example of the United States of Division. Incredibly, there has been at least a plot on the lives of 11 of the last 12 presidents. Overall, four presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) have died from an assassin’s bullet; three others (Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and Trump) were shot; another three (Jackson, FDR, and Ford) were shot at. During Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidencies, gunmen fired shots at the White House but didn’t hit anything. Last May, a young man tried to drive a box truck through a White House barrier. Taft, Hoover, Truman, Carter, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden all saw attempts on their life thwarted. Arthur Bremer tried to shoot Nixon twice but couldn’t get a good angle on him, so instead he shot George Wallace.
This is a deeply and consistently violent country.
No political party, movement, ideology, or manner of thinking has had an absolute monopoly on this violence, and it really hasn’t mattered whether the surrounding political atmosphere was aggressive or docile. Attempts by conservatives to blame liberal rhetoric for yesterday’s events are more than despicable; they’re ahistorical. It’s a big country of violent people and easy access to weapons that can be fashioned to kill. And those realities exist in an undercurrent of a precarious union, a nation whose citizens don’t all look like each other and have always been uneasy in each other’s presence.
The right capitalizing on President Biden’s invocation of the word “bull’s-eye” at a donor event is reminiscent of the left capitalizing on Sarah Palin’s PAC running an ad putting political opponents in the crosshairs during the 2010 midterms. It would be wrong to think that mentally ill people who try to kill political leaders are triggered by such metaphors. It would also be wrong to lament today’s coarse, apocalyptic tone as some new entry into American politics, or that there’s some special tone level where incidents like this don’t happen. You don’t get assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, on 20 of the 45 men to hold the office of president because all of them served during “unique” times. This nation contains rogues, and those rogues can get a gun pretty much at will.
The saying is that a conservative is a liberal who has just been mugged. (The research shows that to be completely untrue.) There have been constant attacks on the presidency, most by firearm, for 60 years, and that has done very little to change the views of our heads of state around firearms. It took 12 years after Reagan was shot to pass the Brady Bill; the bill failed in 1987 during Reagan’s tenure in office. We had 261 mass shootings with four or more casualties in the first half of the year, and that was down from 340 last year. (Trump’s rally in Butler, with so far one dead excluding the shooter, doesn’t yet qualify.) If we were going to have a mass change of heart in the party that resists limiting access to firearms—even one that could get past the Second Amendment absolutists on the Supreme Court—it should have happened by now, and I doubt that even the risk to the lives of their standard-bearer will change the calculation.
The point is that these types of tragic outcomes only change the hearts and minds of leaders in movies and books. In our messy reality, political violence exists as a background hum, and doesn’t really alter the contest for power. Steve Scalise was almost killed on a congressional baseball practice field; Gabrielle Giffords, the same, at a constituent meetup. We kept rolling along. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was assaulted by a neighbor, and Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) by an assailant at her Washington apartment. We kept rolling along.
In the aftermath, we should be having a few conversations: How can the one building in the vicinity with a line of sight on the stage not be secured in advance? What is the actual rationale for the Department of Homeland Security 22 years after its establishment? Have any of the agencies under its purview been effective? And should the weapons that turn any location within 400 feet of a president into a launching pad for violence be so damn easy to get?
But these invocations of the need to take down the political temperature, especially from those who have spent political careers stoking it, are fake efforts to pursue political gain from the split-second actions of a lone gunman. Not only are they extremely cynical, they’re likely useless. Anyone who tells you that they know how this will resonate politically, or that its effects will be long-lasting, doesn’t have a good sense of our often bloody, forgetful history, or a political environment that is so tightly polarized that one candidate can get convicted on 34 felonies and the other can show enough evidence of cognitive decline during a debate that significant factions of his own party have been telling him to drop out, and it hasn’t moved the state of the race more than a point or two in either direction.
Seeing our times as singularly violent rather than existing along an unending continuum of violence would usher in the suppression of oppositional speech, in whatever direction, in the name of security. That would put us down a very dangerous path. I don’t have an answer for stemming political violence, and nobody has for our 248 post-Revolutionary years. But I know intimidating people into silence is a hop and a skip to criminalizing dissent.
