M.A. Kleen

Will this finally be the inflection point we need to pull our country back from the brink?

Like many Americans, I opened social media this weekend and couldn’t believe my own eyes. Breaking reports from Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania showed the former president clutching his bleeding ear, surrounded by Secret Service agents after multiple shots fired. It was something I have never seen, and never hoped to see, in my lifetime–the attempted assassination of a president or presidential candidate (I was just a twinkle in my mom’s eye when John Hinckley, Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in March 1981).

And we were able to watch it over and over, in crystal clear, high definition photos, video, and sound. One incredible photo even captured a bullet in mid air as it whizzed past Trump’s head. Another showed Trump bowing his head, bleeding and dazed, moments after he dropped to the ground. Nothing like it has ever been captured in such intimate detail and clarity in this history of our country. Dozens of cameras all trained on that one moment.

Immediately following the attack, social media denizens began speculating that it was staged or fake. Tell that to the two dead (including the perpetrator) and two critically injured, not to mention the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who was mere centimeters away from a fatal shot. Wild speculation is common after events like this, apparently even in the face of the aforementioned footage. Something so shocking can’t have really happened. 

But, of course, it did, and it will send shockwaves through American political life.

I have spent most of my adult life advocating for peaceful solutions to our problems, whether it was protesting the Iraq War in college, warning against divisive and inflammatory politics as an opinion columnist, or studying American radicalism and political violence as an amateur historian. I lived through the ’90s, so I’m aware that political violence is not a new phenomenon in the American experience. 

But after an 8-month tour in Iraq during the fight against ISIS, my eyes were opened to what it looks like to live in a failed state, where riots, shootings, armed militias, and bombings are as a part of the political process as fundraising and voter registration drives. That’s not something I ever want to see for the United States. That’s not the kind of country I want my daughter to grow up in.

Thankfully, two hours after the event, President Joseph R. Biden held a brief press conference condemning the assassination attempt, saying “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.” This is a relief, because just few weeks ago he (or someone on his social media team) tweeted “Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”

The Biden Campaign immediately pulled down TV attack ads targeting Trump, but he has been deploying this kind of incendiary rhetoric, without any criticism or push back from the press, for a long time. Just a few days ago he claimed Trump is going to “take away” America’s 250 year history of being a “free and democratic nation.”

For years, nothing has been too extreme or outlandish for Donald Trump’s detractors, from calling him a “threat to democracy,” a “Putin puppet,” even a “demon,” he tried to carry out an “insurrection” (even though not one of the over 1,200 Jan 6 defendants have been charged with that crime), and, of course, he’s “literally Hitler.” Partisan pundits, and even the sitting president himself, continue to peddle the same debunked lies over and over. Trump called Nazis “very fine people,” he told Americans to drink bleach during the Covid pandemic, etc.

The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was 12 when Trump first ran for president. He came of age hearing, day after day, that Trump is a terrible threat to this country. His detractors said these things with impunity, without any consequence (except perhaps for Kathy Griffin, who posted pictures of herself holding up a fake Trump head covered in blood). Is it far fetched to think this guy believed he would be hailed as a hero for preventing the rise of the next Hitler?

Trump has said many dumb, offensive, and inflammatory things over the years. That doesn’t make it ok to defame and slander him in return. Aren’t we supposed to be better than that? To rise above it?

I honestly hope this incident shocks some sense into our country, and everyone really means it when they say we need to turn down the political temperature. If not, well, I’ve read this story in history books, I’ve seen it firsthand in Iraq, and it doesn’t end well.