On Saturday morning, New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan shared the news online that he’d become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Scrolling past it, I had two thoughts.
First: Congratulations! It’s heartwarming to see an immigrant excited about becoming an American, even for those of us who have lost all sense of national communion.
Second: This is like putting your life savings into Enron in 2001.
The bankruptcy analogy was still on my mind a few hours later when an assassin missed a kill shot aimed at the body politic by roughly an inch. “Gradually, then suddenly” is how Hemingway famously described the process of going bankrupt. That’s how America’s civic collapse over the last 10 years has proceeded too: Gradually, and then—almost—very suddenly in Pennsylvania.
The strange thing about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is how familiar elements of it felt despite the fact that political assassinations in the U.S. are rare. (Although not that rare.)
To start with, there was a massive institutional failure by an arm of the federal government. The Secret Service will eventually muster some excuse for why it let a rooftop with a clear line of sight to the former president’s podium go unpoliced, but there is no excuse, obviously. They screwed up. Uncle Sam does it a lot nowadays.
There was Trump himself, a creature of instincts, reverting to instinct at a primal moment. Pumping his fist, playing to his fans, exhorting them to “fight, fight, fight” as bullets whizzed around was the essence of his persona laid bare by danger. It was an impressive show of bravado by someone whose bravado isn’t as impressive when the cameras aren’t on.
Then there was the shooter, the very picture of the nebbishy loner we all expect whenever news breaks of another school shooting. Bullied by classmates, drawn to guns: He was so stereotypical that a relative told me she wondered if he directed his homicidal urges at Trump simply because schools are out for the summer.
In fact, as details about the gunman emerged on Sunday, right-wing demagoguery on social media about the great unspecified “they” who are supposedly to blame for the shooting seemed to quiet down a bit. Maybe MAGA types were mollified by Joe Biden and other Democrats scrambling to send well wishes to Trump, but I suspect their own hunches about what typically motivates nerdy young weirdos to kill began to inform their theories of what happened.
We may yet learn that the assassin was a left-wing radical driven to murder by Biden’s warnings about democracy being on the ballot this fall. But no one will be surprised, I think, if it turns out that he was just another twisted young man starved for respect who thought his own show of bravado involving an AR-15 would earn him some in death.
His epitaph should read that he was an enemy of democracy. There are a lot of them in this story.
Political violence inspires tedious writing because most commentators are decent people and decent people all have the same predictable reaction to it.
“It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that,” the president said in his address from the Oval Office on Sunday night. Everyone involved in politics who cares about their country—even those at the periphery—will reflect that same priority because they understand the implications of not doing so.
Assassins are enemies of democracy. They’re murderers too, of course—one of the bullets meant for Trump killed a father of two—but they warrant special hatred for their affront to the political order. It’s one thing to kill, it’s another to deprive hundreds of millions of citizens of their choice of national leader. The words “rigged election” have been wildly overused since November 2020 but assassination really is election-rigging of the highest order.
It’s not regicide. It’s an attack on the people themselves.
Assassins are also enemies of liberalism. We can debate the finer details of what liberalism requires of its supporters, but granting people the right to advocate for bad policies without fear of having their heads blown off is part of the basic package. You might think you believe in freedom of speech and of association, but if you’re willing to murder someone for exercising those rights in a way you don’t like, you don’t.
The paradox of liberalism is that it doesn’t withhold its protections from those who oppose it.
That’s not because it’s inherently virtuous; it’s because liberalism with exceptions is nonsensical. If it’s okay to shoot Donald Trump because his vision for America is illiberal, then America is already illiberal. To embrace exceptions is to set the rules of engagement…
Read More: Enemies of Democracy – The Dispatch