What a trauma. What an inevitability.
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump horrifies. It’s an assault on everything America stands for, an attack on democracy itself.
One attendee, a man reportedly seated behind Trump, was shot in the head and died. Two other attendees have been critically injured.
An eyewitness told NBC News that he had taken time off work to come to Saturday’s event in Pennsylvania. He had never been to a political rally before, he said. He thought it would be fun.
Trump pumps his fist as he’s surrounded by secret service agents
In relating what he had just seen, a man shot to death before his eyes and a former president nearly killed, he said he was unsure of the details.
‘Time dilates,’ he said.
Time dilates, indeed. And so, now, has this election.
A Trump supporter named Tracy spoke for us all.
‘Why,’ she asked, ‘is this happening in our country today?’
Americans are exhausted. This presidential election cycle already felt more grueling than the one before that, and the one before that. Now, it feels unbearable.
Trump supporters hide as gunfire rings out at the Pennsylvania campaign rally
We have whipsawed, in the past few weeks, from disbelief to embarrassment to shock and sadness.
This is is a kind of terror and violence this nation should be long past.
We saw Trump wince, touch his ear, see blood, then duck and cover before the Secret Service swarmed him.
After the shooter was reportedly shot dead, the security agents began lifting Trump, who could be heard saying, ‘Let me get my shoes’ — indicating that he was surrounded with such force that his shoes came off.
Once upright, Trump faced the crowd, blood smeared on the right side of his face, and pumped his fist in the air.
‘Fight!’ he yelled to the crowd. ‘Fight! Fight!’
It was pure Donald Trump: Defiance and iconography. His statement, released on Truth Social just hours later — while he was still in the hospital — was tonally perfect.
He thanked the Secret Service and law enforcement before talking not of himself, but the shooter’s other victims.
‘Most importantly,’ Trump wrote, ‘I want to extend my condolences to the family of the person at the rally who was killed, and also to the family of another person that was badly injured. It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.’
It’s also incredible that it took President Biden nearly two hours to make a statement — not so much as a tweet, or a one-line press release beforehand. Perhaps he was napping at the beach house.
When Biden did speak, roused at Rehoboth Beach, it was to decry ‘political violence’. His words were markedly impersonal.
It’s a very small club, former living U.S. presidents. You would think, despite whatever personal enmity exists, that the attempted assassination of one of them might bring forth words from our current president that meet the moment, not boilerplate campaign dross — dross that nonetheless managed to sound nonsensical. Counterfactual.
‘The idea that there’s political violence like this in America is just unheard of,’ he said.
It is? Sitting U.S. presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were killed by assassins. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan all survived assassination attempts. It’s actually all too well-heard of.
‘Look,’ Biden continued. ‘There’s no place in America for this kind of violence… That’s why we have to unite this country.’
No urgency, no human compassion, or a moment of detente.
Trump supporter Tracy asked: ‘Why is this happening in our country today?’
Same with former president Barack Obama, who was himself such a target that he was reportedly outfitted in a bullet-resistant suit for his 2009 inauguration.
Obama, too, took hours to express his condolences, or what passes for them, on X.
‘There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,’ he wrote. ‘Although we don’t yet know exactly what happened, we should all be relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt, and use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.’
Wow. That’s allegedly the best orator in modern American politics. He could have done better.
How galling to be lectured on ‘uniting the country’ and ‘recommitting ourselves to civility’ by two U.S. presidents who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, respond to this tragedy with the urgency it deserves, and through gritted teeth say they’re glad Trump wasn’t seriously injured.
This election isn’t going to get any more civil; far from it.
But America has been through worse. We survived the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in rapid succession.
We survived 9/11, the pandemic, and — despite daily hair-on-fire warnings from the left — Trump’s first term.
We’ll get through this, too. And we’ll be stronger for it.
