Trump Assassination Attempt: Why I'm Not Surprised

I attended a private conference last week where I was introduced as “a man who has made a career of stating the self-evident”. While some might see this description as a slight, to me it is a source of tremendous satisfaction. In a society which has forced large swathes of its citizenry to pretend that what they see with their own eyes must never be uttered out loud, describing the obvious reality is a worthy endeavour. That being the case, what is the self-evident truth of the last 48 hours?

I woke up on Sunday morning to the news that President Trump had been shot in an assassination attempt. My phone was bursting with notifications; a mixture of concern and unprintable memes. Like many, I experienced a range of emotions. From shock, to relief that the assassination failed, to concern for the future of an America in which this sort of thing could happen.

Have you considered buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? My bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company. Competitive premiums, terrific service. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them for ease and convenience.

What occurred at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania had -- and may still have -- the potential to be one of those singular moments in history which changes the world forever. One need not reach for the overused example of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which sparked the outbreak of World War I. Every significant revolution in modern history from the French, to the American to the Russian, was the product of events that no one could have predicted having the outcome they did. Likewise, the unanticipated and still-not-fully understood consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the Global Financial Crisis plague us to this day.

Preoccupied with these historical precedents, my busy mind took many hours to settle. And it was only when it did that I realised the sad truth. There was one emotion I hadn’t experienced: surprise.

Obviously, I do not mean that I had prior knowledge of the attack or that I was aware of some sort of conspiracy to murder President Trump. I mean only that, for some time now, we have lived in a society in which this sort of thing could conceivably happen.

To be clear, this article is not meant to blame the assassination attempt on my favourite political complaint as politicians and commentators of every stripe have done over recent days.

Republicans attempted to present recent comments by President Biden in which he argued that enough time has been spent on debates about his mental acuity as the motivating factor for the attack. Apparently we are supposed to believe that Biden incited the shooting when he said “We can’t waste any more time being distracted. I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump” before adding “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose main achievement is to demonstrate that a low IQ is no impediment to success in politics, went further, tweeting that “The Democrat party… just tried to murder Donald Trump”.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, have, for once, abandoned their pretence of being the party of good people. YouTuber Destiny, who you might remember from a recent debate on TRIGGERnometry, had a full mask-off moment when he celebrated the death of Corey Comperatore, a man whose only crime was to be in the crowd. Comperatore was killed as he dived on top of his daughter to protect her from the gunfire with the only thing he had: his body.

“A person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country caught a stray? I’m so sad, please” Destiny tweeted.

Mehdi Hasan, meanwhile, spent the last few days using the attack to score political points, retweeting things like this to his 1.5 million followers:

Naturally, all of this is abominable behaviour in and of itself–even more so when it concerns an event in which a man died and several others were seriously injured. But to focus on this would be to conceal a more fundamental and self-evident truth: the way we talk about our political opponents is simply criminal.

In this instance, the right will justifiably paint the rhetoric, jokes and military metaphors deployed by the left as the cause of the assassination attempt. The left will deflect by citing Donald Trump’s suggestion that the problem of Hillary Clinton could be solved by the Second Amendment and other irresponsible comments. Both will be right because, as with most issues nowadays, whatever case you want to make, the evidence is all there. The real question for someone who doesn’t believe that jokes and metaphors make people shoot politicians is: “What is the context in which an attempt on the life of a presidential candidate is no longer surprising?”

Like you, I know nothing about the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. I heard someone on TV describe the 20-year-old as a “nutjob”. Is that the most logical explanation?, I thought to myself. After all, in a political climate in which Trump has been described as “Hitler”, “fascist”, “Nazi”, “dictator” and so on, would it really be crazy to assassinate him? I know that you and I are sensible, emotionally well-regulated people who never took these allegations seriously, whether we liked Trump or not. But not everyone out there is sensible, emotionally well-regulated or educated about history. What if you were a 20-year-old man? What if, like most 20-year-old men, you were seeking a mission worthy of your life? What if you were emotionally dysregulated? What if you lacked the judgement, IQ or plain common sense to disbelieve the people on your screens who kept screaming that he is a Nazi? What if you actually thought Trump was Hitler? In that situation, as a patriot and a dedicated citizen who wanted to go down in history, would you not be duty-bound to grab a rifle, climb on a roof and pull the trigger? After all, how would history remember a man who managed or even attempted to eliminate Hitler? Do we not make movies about men like Colonel von Stauffenberg who did just that?

To be clear, I make no claim as to the shooter’s motivations. I am merely attempting to process my own lack of surprise at the assassination attempt itself. The self-evident truth is that we have ceased to love our neighbour. We may never know what the true reasons for the shooting of President Trump were, but what we do know is that it is time for this type of politics to end. Because if it doesn’t, something else will.