The Trump shooting is an indictment of the national mood

It was a long, hot, steamy day in Butler, Pennsylvania when someone crawled onto a rooftop that had baked in the sun, set up a rifle and tried to shoot Donald Trump in the head. We don’t at this juncture know anything about that person for certain except that he is male, and that his presence on that rooftop surprised the countersniper teams designated with protecting the former president, giving him the split seconds needed to fire off a number of shots, killing at least one rally attendee and injuring others. But the effect this sniper had is immense. This is the first serious attempt on the life of a former or current president in more than forty years, and it came a hair’s breadth away from a live on television assassination that could have plunged the nation into a very real civil war.

The immediate response from Trump was impressive considering that, if you have ever been under fire, the tendency is to go into shock. There was a taste of this in his insistence on getting his shoes before the Secret Service escorted him from the stage. For an excruciating few seconds that seemed like minutes, he paused, then raised his fist to the crowd and urged them to “fight.” The stubborn refusal to be bowed inspired the chant immediately: “USA! USA!” And as the former president was escorted and carried by a group of agents as nervous as a hair-trigger, the crowd turned to raise middle fingers to the press and cameras that had captured it all, blaming them for what just occurred in front of the nation and the world.

The crowd in Butler is not wrong to do that. The degree to which the media has fomented an argument against Donald Trump as an “existential” threat, opposed to democracy and ushering in a new dark century of fascism, has been unprecedented even in the long history of demonizing Republicans. This is not to say they drove the shooter to practice, buy his rifle, build up his resolve and take his shot. It is to say they created a circumstance where such an incident does not surprise the vast majority of conservatives in this country. No Republican truly views Joe Biden as an existential threat except to the extent he is napping while the world burns around him. But for the left, the danger is there — and there are people who profit from it immensely. 

The immediate aftermath of this shooting had the likes of Margaret Brennan of CBS News chiding Trump for his social media post announcing that he was OK, claiming that it did nothing to lower the temperature of hot-button American politics. You got shot? Well, maybe your skirt was too short. Expect more of that attitude in the weeks to come from the same media that lied to you for years about Joe Biden’s ability to function between the hours of the early bird special and a cottage cheese brunch. 

People will be prognosticating about what this shooting means for November 2024 and, yes, I think we can all guess what it means. But overall, this is an indictment of the Secret Service; an indictment of the media; and an indictment of those whose aggressive hate-filled rhetoric toward Donald Trump helped raise the intensity of everyone opposed to him. We don’t know there’s a through-line to this shooter. But there is a through-line to the tenor of the nation’s discourse, one where you don’t just root for your opponents to lose, you eagerly express your desire for them to get a bullet. Nothing good can ever come from that.