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Politics & Elections

Trump’s Instinct After Being Shot Was to Incite His Followers to “Fight”

A growing right-wing consensus has been quick to blame Trump’s critics for the shooting.

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Men wearing right-wing insignia are seen at a shooting range with a variety of weapons during the "Rod of Iron Freedom Festival" on October 9, 2022, in Greeley, Pennsylvania.

According to Brady United, the nation’s oldest gun violence prevention group, 327 people are shot with guns every day in the United States. Over one million have been shot in the last decade. There are more civilian-owned firearms than there are people in this country. Gun violence is so ubiquitous that we only raise our heads once in a great while when the body count is shockingly high or the victims are particularly vulnerable, like elementary school children. But this weekend we all looked up sharply when a lone sniper shot at Donald Trump, grazing his ear, killing a spectator and wounding two others.

These shootings are all horrific but this one was particularly shocking because America’s history of political assassinations is very long. We are living in one of our acute periods of political violence, whether from religious terrorism or unbalanced people who are radicalized on the internet. There have been attempted assassinations, assaults and violent threats against members of Congress, the judiciary, the media and election officials in recent years and now the current Republican nominee for president, who also happens to be a former president. We are awash in political violence and the proliferation of guns has made it particularly deadly.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many people’s immediate assumption was that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Saturday was motivated by politics or ideology. While the vast majority of political violence of the past few years has been at the hands of jihadist radicals or right-wing extremists, there have been a few attackers out of the left, such as the man who shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise during a congressional baseball game practice. So it’s understandable that people would suspect the shooting could be motivated by hostility to Donald Trump.

Some of the rally-goers immediately turned on the reporters covering the event, reportedly claiming the press was responsible for the gunman’s actions and had blood on their hands. Republican officials, like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, rumored to be Trump’s top contender for running mate, immediately accused President Joe Biden and the Democrats of inciting the shooter by campaigning against Trump as a threat to democracy.

Some, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., went even further:

The consensus on the right formed very quickly that this wasn’t just an assassination attempt, it was the natural consequence of Democratic criticism of their political rival, Donald Trump. This set off a flurry of more solemn remonstrations from other Republicans demanding that the Democrats “change the tone” of their campaign rhetoric. President Biden obliged and very quickly condemned the attack in a Saturday address. In his formal Oval Office address Sunday, the president said, “I want to speak to you about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics.” All the former presidents followed suit with similar statements as well, as did virtually every other elected Democrat.

Everyone said the “right thing” and they used all the comfortable conventional phrases. As David Frum observed in The Atlantic:

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

[…]

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

Witness Speaker Mike Johnson unctuously declaring that Trump is “the most attacked persecuted president in history, maybe since Abraham Lincoln” and condemning the Democrats for saying the stakes in this election are anything unusual. When confronted with Donald Trump’s own rhetoric he just kept on going:

Donald Trump is a demagogue and there is no one in political life who is more rhetorically violent than he is. With all the talk of lowering the temperature, nobody’s mentioned the fact that the most incendiary rhetoric about the event came from Donald Trump himself when he raised his fist and pumped it angrily yelling “fight” repeatedly to his crowd as he was led off the stage. I understand that he was probably in shock but that moment became instantly iconic and it was anything but calm and statesmanlike.

What did Trump mean by that? Was it just another opportunity to look tough, like his glowering expression in his mug shot? Was he hamming it up for the cameras? Or was he once again exhorting his followers to “fight” like they did on January 6? With all the lugubrious handwringing over Biden and the Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy, nobody seems to care that his instinct in that horrible moment was to incite more violence.

The internet has been deluged with merchandise commemorating the moment already. Every person at the GOP convention this week will no doubt be wearing a t-shirt with the famous photo from the Associated Press’ Evan Vucci on it. Members of his faithful following are even getting tattoos of the image:

Saturday’s event was the first such act of gun violence in many years that didn’t follow the usual ritual of initial horror and wall-to-wall coverage before we quickly move on to the next one. This incident has inspired a totally different narrative. Few are talking about the fact that this was a 20-year-old kid who got a hold of a semi-automatic weapon, apparently owned by his father. Nobody is saying this is a problem of mental health, not easy access to guns. It’s a rush to talk about politics and yet we have no evidence, as of yet, that this was a partisan political act at all.

Yes, shooting at a presidential candidate or a president is inherently “political” by definition. But this shooter was a registered Republican who liked guns so he hardly fits the profile of a left-wing extremist inspired by Joe Biden’s stirring denunciations of Donald Trump. And not all assassination attempts are political anyway. Remember, Ronald Reagan was shot by someone who was trying to impress a movie star.

It’s certainly possible that we’ll find out that he was so upset by someone calling Donald Trump a fascist that he took action. It’s also possible that we’ll find out that he was just another unhappy, unstable young man who decided that his life as he knew it wasn’t worth living and decided to go out in a blaze of glory. It literally happens in this country all the time and the great irony is that Donald Trump and his party have absolutely no answers for that plaguing problem at all. If that’s what this turns out to be I guess we’ll all just have to give him our thoughts and prayers and then move on.

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