The Collective Shoulder Shrug Following the Assassination Attempts
One of the strangest things about the assassination attempts against Donald Trump is that so few people outside the MAGA base seemed to care.
Between 1963 and 1981 political assassinations, a distinct subset of the political violence that has defined the United States of America since before it was a country and that continues today most notably in the carceral state, were relatively common.
John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X were assassinated. There were two attempts on President Gerald Ford’s life within a period of fewer than three weeks. Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace was shot and badly injured in 1972. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in 1978, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan barely survived an assassination attempt.
In a period of fewer than twenty years, two American presidents survived assassination attempts and one was assassinated, but until recently, since 1981 there had been no attempts to assassinate a president or major presidential candidate-until this summer. This is undoubtedly due in part to the efforts made by various security forces to keep these high ranking politicians safe, but it is nonetheless significant.
This summer there have been two assassination attempts against Donald Trump. In one, back in July, a bullet was fired and Trump was hit but, fortunately, neither badly injured nor killed. In the second attempt, which occurred in September, no bullet was fired, but an armed man made his way almost on to the golf course where Trump was playing.
The most astounding things about these attempts was not that they occurred, but how little the American people care about them. A major American politician, who at the time of the first shooting was the front-runner to become the next president, was almost assassinated and the American people shrugged their collective shoulders.
In the weeks following the July shooting, I noted numerous conversations about politics and the election, sometimes with media and sometimes with friends and colleagues where the topic of the assassination either was only brought up after an hour or so, or was never brought up at all. Even the media lost interest in the assassinations after a few days.
Trump may yet win this election, but one key measure of how the American people feel about him is the lack of interest they have shown in not one, but two, attempts on his life. This is further evidence of not just the degree, but the nature of the divisions in the US.
One reason the assassination attempts did not feel like singularly important events was because the Republicans responded the way they respond to pretty much everything. Among Trump’s supporters, the first assassination attempt immediately descended into a predictable medley of bizarre conspiracy theorizing and lashing out at imaginary deep state enemies.
Then, at the Republican Convention, which began a few days after the first shooting, many Republicans wore cotton bandages on their right ears to show their cult-like support for their almost fallen leader. Overall, the Republican reaction to the assassination helped quickly drag the event back into the partisan lens through which all politics is understood in recent years.
And the rest of the America just didn’t care.
Most Americans are so exhausted with the Donald Trump experience-exhausted-with the noise, the bellicosity, the lies, the fascism, the anger, the hatred, the wacked out conspiracies and the racism-that they could not bring themselves to pay much attention to something that, in normal times, would be a very big deal for all Americans.
The reaction, outside of the MAGA base, to the assassination attempts does not tell us anything about who might win the election, which is still according to almost all the data we have, too close too call. However, it may tell us something interesting about what a second Trump presidency might look like, and more specifically what the resistance might look like in that eventuality.
A second Trump presidency, while in many respects likely to be more dangerous than the first Trump presidency would, based on how so many Americans responded to the assassinations, lead many Americans to try to tune out the obnoxious turmeric tyrant in the White House rather than actively engage in resistance. This is very understandable, and is very tempting, but it is not the response we need.
In the remaining weeks of the campaign, opposition to Trump can be impactfully expressed in a clear and finite way. We must vote, volunteer and, if we can, contribute financially to Democratic causes. These are both easily understandable and implementable tasks. At the very least, everybody who believes in American democracy must vote for Harris, but a Trump victory would be a political and psychic blow from which it would be very difficult to recover and that would sap our collective psychic energy.
The collective national response to Trump being shot was essentially 100 million people saying “I don’t care what happened to that dude, I just want him to go away.” That is a sentiment to which I can easily relate, but it is also not a position that, collectively, we can afford to take.