The reaction to the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life has been bizarre, to say the least. News stories since have retailed claims that, eh, the shooter couldn’t have had a clean shot at him anyway—and, most startling on the website of the “Taste Dies in Darkness” Washington Post tonight, that Trump was warned years ago he could be an assassination target on a golf course and that nonetheless he persisted in hitting the links. In other words, Carol Leonnig, Josh Dawsey, and Isaac Stanley-Becker are effectively saying in a disgraceful story that functions as an ass-covering exercise for the now entirely discredited U.S. Secret Service, Trump was just asking for it.
Indeed, the superstructure of most major media coverage today was that since Trump had spent the week talking anti-migrant trash, he had thereby been nothing but a net contributor to the country’s parlous atmosphere. This, notwithstanding the fact that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced this afternoon that the threats which shut down the schools in Springfield, Ohio, were hoaxes emanating from outside the country—”33 threats, 33 hoaxes,” he said. Not to worry; the CBS Evening News noted no such fact in its coverage of the matter tonight. Indeed, Norah O’Donnell took issue with the fact that Trump had said the rhetoric out of the Biden-Harris-Democratic camps had played a role in the increased danger he finds himself in by citing the very narrative DeWine had just told the American people seemed to be a dirty trick coming from a bad actor abroad.
“Donald Trump is blaming Democrats for inflaming political rhetoric,” O’Donnell said, “but the former President’s own words seem to be increasing the threat of political violence in Springfield, Ohio. That’s where a false and ugly accusation against Haitians—thousands of whom are legal permanent residents—is impacting every day life.”
The impact on daily life, I need to say a third time, seems to have been the result of pot-stirring involving foreign actors who posed no actual threat to anyone—as opposed to Ryan Routh, who sat in a blind for 12 hours near the Trump golf course waiting to take his shot. What is the point here? The implicit idea of the link between the assassination and the Ohio anti-migrant talk was that Trump had somehow been asking for it. What else are we to take away from the merger of the “they’re eating the dogs” garbage Trump has been peddling and the fact that a 58 year-old man in a pink shirt was determined to try and alter world history from a sniper’s nest?
On Tuesday, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski introduced a report on the attempt by Garrett Haake, and then when the camera returned to her face, launched into a two-minute history (read off a teleprompter, so therefore pre-planned by the show’s producer and theoretically approved in some fashion by MSNBC’s senior management) of all the times Trump has encouraged violence. She stitched together the genuinely disturbing (January 6 is “gonna be wild,” went the Trump tweet) with the jokey (Trump’s line about how he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it) and the transparently dishonest (that he supported the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017). The net result was a five-minute segment that, once again, was designed to make you think Trump was asking for it.
Let’s talk tachlis, as we say in Hebrew. Let’s talk straight. The reason so many people in this country seem determined not to consider the profound seriousness of a potential new age of assassination—a return to the destabilizing period that tormented this country and the West between JFK in 1963 and the Reagan/John Paul II attempts in 1981—is that it represents a dark wish fulfillment for so many people.
Donald Trump has refused to go away. He lost the 2020 election and wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t stand down, wouldn’t stand for a peaceful transition if there could be a chaotic and dangerous one. And the minute the next president began to serve, he began to run again—something no one in his position as ex-president had done from within his own party for 130 years. People hate him. They revile him. They fear him. They despise him. What they would like, more than anything, is for him to go away.
A great many people, and most of the nation’s elites, secretly or not so secretly wish they could see the result sought by would-be killers Routh and Cheeks. And while they know they must pay lip service to the fact that assassinations are bad and wrong and shocking and all that, they simply cannot muster up the emotion of horror. That’s what’s missing here from the coverage and discussions of these two attempts: Horror. Because they’re not horrified.
And they should be.
This is the darkest kind of fantasy, because it can be fulfilled—and the consequences would be unthinkably dangerous for the future of this country.
Those who wish Trump gone think the future with him in it as president for the second time will be a nightmare come true. But they do not begin to grasp the nature of the future in which Trump is removed from life and history with an act of violence that—though they would be outraged at the very suggestion—would be understood by history as an emanation of their dark, raging wish. It would be “the monkey’s paw” overtaking the world.
I understand that wish. I wish he’d gone away as well. I wish he’d accepted the results of 2020, I wish he hadn’t done the things that helped inspire January 6, I wish he hadn’t made disgraceful moves in Senatorial races that gave his rivals enough control in Washington to pass ruinous and bad legislation, and I wish he had allowed the Republican party to move on and find new leadership. His presidential candidacy is an unhealthy thing for his party and his country, though it’s probably more a manifestation of the country’s ill political health than the cause of it.
But, dear God, would it be worse for us if these assassins had succeeded. And will it be worse for us if one were to succeed between now and election day, or after, should he win. So much worse, infinitely worse—because that event will tear the country to shreds. That’s not even remotely metaphorical.
So go ahead, Washington Post, say Trump’s golfing is the real threat. Go ahead, MSNBC and the Atlantic, say the real problem is Trump talking cruelly about migrants in Ohio. Go ahead and find excuses for a thing that cannot be allowed to happen. If we do reap the whirlwind from the fulfillment of your darkest desires, history will know whom to blame—not that it will matter, because the damage will have been done. You all think he’s asking for it. What you are asking for is a future straight out of Thomas Hobbes.
