David Goldman/AP Photo
The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has not only shocked the nation but posed a fundamental challenge to the Republicans.
Last Friday afternoon, I filed what was to be the Prospect’s kickoff piece for this week’s Republican National Convention, which begins today in Milwaukee. In it, I mentioned that the convention story was “likely to be considerably eclipsed by the Democrats’ ongoing and somewhat altered staging of King Lear, which, for all I know, may only be in the second act of the prescribed five.” It was possible, I added, “that the Republicans may have to work to break into the news cycle.”
Well, that was then.
The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has not only shocked the nation but posed such a fundamental challenge to the Republicans that this week’s convention has become a kind of test for them. On the one hand, they will project themselves as the party of order and blame the Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular for inflaming public discourse. On the other hand, their standard condemnations of the Democrats and Biden are down-the-line inflammatory. It’s precisely inflammatory rhetoric that differentiates Trump from many Republicans (certainly not all) in previous generations of party leadership. It’s precisely Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric that is responsible for his rise atop the party; it’s that rhetoric that has remade the party in his image. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, who just a couple of weeks ago said at a church service, “Some folks need killing. It’s time for someone to say it,” is a featured speaker in Milwaukee.
When I covered the first Republican convention to nominate Trump, in 2016, it was clear that his delegates had come complete with a level of rage that had been lacking at the five Republican conventions I’d previously covered. Several speakers (Chris Christie and Michael Flynn, to cite just two) led the delegates in chanting “Lock her up!” when mention was made of the Democratic nominee that year, Hillary Clinton, whose mortal sin was to have had some emails dealing with her onetime duties as secretary of state routed to her personal email address.
If you watched Fox News at all in the hours and days following Saturday’s shooting, you’ll have seen the challenges that the Republicans face. In the hours immediately following the shooting, hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham noted that they didn’t want to rush to lay blame, while in the same breath attacking Biden’s Friday speech in Detroit for leading to the shooting. Hannity also began railing at the assuredly violent immigrants who might be behind it, even as the shooter had yet to be identified. (He turns out to have been white, and born in the USA.)
Most of what Republican electeds have said since the shooting doesn’t suggest they’re interested in mutual rhetorical de-escalation. Georgia Rep. Mike Collins tweeted, “Joe Biden sent the orders,” then added, “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, Pa., should immediately file charges against Joe Biden for inciting an assassination.” Others drew a through line from Hillary Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as “deplorables” straight to Saturday’s shooting, failing, of course, to note Trump’s recent repeated descriptions of his own political adversaries as “vermin.”
That kind of double standard is guaranteed to dominate this week’s convention. It’s also sure to be a feature of the upcoming Republican-led House hearings into how the Secret Service failed to detect and stop Saturday’s attempted assassin, which is, of course, a question absolutely requiring an urgent answer. But Saturday wasn’t the first time in recent years that the Secret Service did not deter gun-toters outside the perimeter of a Trump rally. On January 6, 2021, as Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, has testified, the Secret Service told Trump that there were men with visible guns on the periphery of that rally, at which Trump directed attendees to go up to the Capitol to protest the counting of electoral votes. Trump told his security officials to take down the magnetometers through which up-close rally-goers were required to pass. Those magnetometers were there precisely to stop anyone carrying a gun, and Trump didn’t like the idea that the gun carriers would have to stand off at a distance. As Hutchinson testified, Trump said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.”
I’m fairly certain this won’t come up at any House hearing.
For his part, Biden has been standard-issue presidential in his response to Trump’s near-assassination, speaking to the nation three times in 24 hours to call for more unity and comity, and to urge his compatriots to deal with their very real differences nonviolently. In so doing, he is also attempting to do what his interview with George Stephanopoulos and his Thursday press conference failed to do: convince his fellow Democrats that he’s up to the job. The very fact of the shooting means that Democrats will likely not be publicly calling upon Biden to go at least until the Republican convention is over. Continuing to make the case for Biden’s ouster in the immediate aftermath of the shooting would surely appear unseemly. (Of course, the fact that this intraparty conflict will go dark this week doesn’t mean that Biden’s Democratic critics will stop working behind the scenes.)
But the real challenge this week is the one facing the Republicans. Almost every syllable that this MAGAfied party and its leader have uttered about the Democrats in recent years has come complete with rhetorical vilification and heedless falsification: Communists? Fascists? Baby killers? Vermin? Trump’s own speeches are filled with threats of retribution. How will the Republicans, how will Trump, call for a de-escalation of our divisions, when all this hatred is encoded in their, and his, DNA?
