A Boiling Pot That’s About To Overflow
Unless you've been living under a rock you know by now that on July 13 a gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Here's what we know as of writing: Donald Trump suffered minor injuries, at least one person in the crowd is dead, and several others are dead. The gunman was 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican who once made a donation to "ActBlue," a liberal voter turnout organization, in 2021. He used an AR-15 style rifle to do the shooting.
That's it. That's all we know. So if you're reading something that says more it's probably pure speculation. This is my first point.
There are very few American assassins throughout history that have been motivated by partisan politics. Most crimes of this nature are conducted by unhinged people who are fixated on a particular grievance that may or may not have anything to do with the person they are shooting. John Hinckley Jr shot Ronald Reagan in 1980 because he was obsessed with the Jodie Foster movie "Taxi Driver" and thought he could score a date with the actress if he made the news. Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy out of a fixation on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, and while he was angry at real views that RFK held, they were not central to the campaign and were not classically partisan in nature since most American politicians held views similar to Kennedy's. The FBI profiles of dozens of other would-be-assassins show that most of them have some sort of mental illness.
So, no, we didn't "see this coming," and it can't be blamed on our rhetoric or politics. We know nothing, notwithstanding any other point that can be made about the nature of our politics.
But here's something else we know -- this is not the opening salvo in a new wave of political violence. Political violence has been growing in this country for decades. Hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, and racial minorities have skyrocketed in recent years, as have crimes against the LGBTQ community. Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul was nearly beaten to death in his home in 2022 because of his wife's politics. In October 2018, Cesar Sayoc sent pipe bombs to several high-profile Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and CNN. Sayoc, a Trump supporter, targeted those he perceived as enemies of the president. There was the Charlottesville car attack at the "Unite the Right" rally in 2017, and an anti-immigrant shooter killed 23 people in El Paso Texas in 2019. In 2020, there was a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. In 2017, James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican members of Congress as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was critically wounded. And, of course, there was a coup attempt on January 6, 2021.
I will be writing much more about political violence in this country, but it didn't start last night, and it's not going to stop any time soon. In fact I think it's about to get much, much worse.
Immediately after Trump was shot yesterday, many members of the crowd started to shout at the media that was present, saying that this was their fault. Some members of the crowd even tried to break into the press box. Already there are many statements online blaming Democrats, Joe Biden, or the media for increasing hateful rhetoric to the point where this assassination attempt happened (and, again, that's a logical leap at this point since we don't know the shooter's motivation). Will there be reprisals against the media, or left-leaning politicians? If we look at Trump's own words, he's been calling for them for months:
"We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream...
"The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”
Donald J. Trump
On the left there are many who's biggest problem with yesterday was that the shooter missed. The FBI has been warning for years about radicalized political groups, mostly on the right but also some on the left, and radical far-right ideology is the fastest growing political movements both in America and across the globe.
So here's what we know: political violence in this country has been in the pot, on the front burner, and boiling for years. Now it seems we may have all just fallen into the pot.
All we can do is to call for calm, call out those who jump to conclusions, and try to get ready for what's going to happen next -- and none of us knows what that will be, but I think it's safe to say this will be the most dangerous election cycle we've faced as a nation since the Civil War.
