Oh no, not again. I got that feeling you get of chaos and horror and no one in charge. That terrible, cratering feeling you’ve had before.
I was watching it live, on television, as I readied to go to dinner. Donald Trump was in a red MAGA hat, talking about the border. I turned away for a moment. Then I heard a scream and looked back at the screen. The podium was empty. Mr. Trump seemed beneath it, with Secret Service agents running toward him, surrounding him. There was more screaming than seems apparent in the replays.
I texted my dinner friend: “Something happened.” I called a relative, said put on the TV. We watched as Mr. Trump was hauled up. We saw the blood near his ear. When they trundled him off and he threw up his fist, pumped it at the crowd and shouted, “Fight,” my relative said, “Well, that’s over.” Meaning the election. Meaning you don’t give America an image like that and go on to lose, you give America an image like that and it enters political mythology forever.
Mr. Trump had heard at least one shot, maybe a few. One grazed his ear. He hit the deck, was lifted up in shock, pale. He should have been swiftly rushed from the stage. But no, this is the great genius of American political theater and the reflex kicked in, the same reflex that kicked in after he had Covid and was returned to the White House from the hospital, and wanted to pose on the White House balcony in a Superman shirt with a big S, and somebody talked him out of it. So too at the rally Saturday—he got to his feet, he didn’t wipe the blood from his face, he wanted you to see and understand the whole picture. He got his look of tough-guy fury, the one he showed for weeks walking into court in New York, the one on the mug shot. He raised that fist, pumped it, shouted “Fight,” as part of the crowd began to chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
It was epic. Whatever you feel about him, whatever your stand, grant him one of the great gangsta moves of American political history.
An hour or so later a friend called, a journalist. I told him of my relative’s reaction. He said he wasn’t sure, we are living in a time of such turbulence, too much drama and hatred, maybe in November people will vote for calm. Silence. I said, “But Joe Biden doesn’t make anyone feel calm.” He’s angry, resentful, may not finish the thought. “He makes everyone nervous.”
Beyond all that is the crushing knowledge that this is bad for America, bad for its morale, for its confidence in the idea of its continuance. And of course it is terrible in the eyes of the world, more proof that we can’t hold it together. Europe was asleep when it happened, it was just after midnight in Paris and Berlin, and when they woke up to the news it was clear that the target of the assassination attempt wasn’t seriously wounded and had gone home, and the would-be assassin dead. Still, an American living in England wrote from there, crestfallen: “Our beautiful country, in the gutter.”
That was a better, truer sentiment than the responses of our political leaders, whose reactions have seemed so harrowingly pro forma. “Violence has no place in our country.” They always say those rote and vacuous words. But it does have a place here, it claimed it long ago; that’s our problem. As I write, they are calling the 20-year-old would-be assassin “a loner.” They have been calling assassins and mass murderers loners since I was a child, since Lee Harvey Oswald. For loners, they sure are a big group.
Here might—might, if we aren’t past this—be a better response from the famous. “America, I love you and am of you and grew up here and know your heart. We beg you, and will do our part, at least for a moment, to show real regard and affection for whoever you feel is ‘the other side.’” If you are anti-Trump, here is something deserving praise: His supporters left that rally last night shaken and full of woe and yet many stopped, kindly, to tell reporters what they saw and experienced, so that everyone might better understand what had transpired. It was moving how generous and patient they were, though they’d witnessed something that shook their souls.
Mr. Trump says rough things and rough things are said about him. He does rough things, too, and many of his enemies truly hate him and are accused of trying to thwart him in ways just and unjust.
Can we hope for any improvement? Any amelioration of the bile? Maybe for a short term. The long term? I don’t know. But shocks like an assassination attempt can reorder things in the political culture at least for a while. When something like this happens—when you are shot, and if you’d turned an inch or two this way and not that way, that was the difference between a grazing wound and death—what impact does that have? How do you feel when you see someone you hate assaulted and hurt by a nut with a gun at a public meeting? Does it feel good, or more like a caution, a warning?
We’re all at least united in one hope: that what happened last night will be the worst thing that happens in the 2024 campaign.