Sweating Bullets
In an Oval Office address following a shooter’s attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, PA, President Biden explained, “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized. I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate … Our politics must never be a literal battlefield … We resolve our differences at the ballot box — not with bullets.” He’s right, of course. But as much as this is a story about political violence—which is thankfully rare—it’s also a story about gun violence in America—which is anything but. The shooting in Butler was a uniquely awful moment in America. But it’s also part of a never-ending story of lunatics with easy access to weapons of war and our refusal to address the issue. It’s also the latest chapter in a political news cycle that has gone from nauseatingly overwhelming to dangerously all-encompassing. During the second half of last night’s Copa America soccer final, a TV commentator said “we have a half hour of remaining normal time.” What would we all give for that much political normal time? At one point over the weekend, I turned off my phone, closed my laptop, unplugged the WiFi, and put my head on a pillow … And the stream kept going. You can’t tune it out or turn it off anymore. Some Americans are shooting bullets, but we’re all sweating them.
+ By the time the bullets’ echo had stopped reverberating, the echo chamber was in full swing. It won’t surprise you in the least that the conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting started immediately. But it should worry you that these dangerously irresponsible comments weren’t just coming from the social media masses. They were coming from leading political figures and some of America’s most powerful CEOs. The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Trump Shooting Conspiracies Outpaced Reality.
+ “The FBI has not found a manifesto, and Crooks had never been under FBI investigation. The official confirmed that he did not have an unusual online history for a 20-year-old man. He liked to play chess, video games and was learning how to code, according to a review of his online activities.” NYT (Gift Article): FBI Finds Few Red Flags on a Would-Be Assassin. (The less we learn about the gunman’s motives, the more people can make them up to fit their political goals.) Philly Inquirer: Why Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to assassinate Donald Trump is a mystery to investigators and his ex-classmates. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
+ Secret Service faces serious questions about security footprint and rooftop access at Trump event.
+ David Frum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) with an excellent overview of tragic and tragically ironic moment in America. The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator. “The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now. 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.”
+ The man killed in the assassination attempt on Trump died shielding his family.
+ And, in an age of constantly moving media, WaPo on the powerful photograph that could change America forever. (With the caveat that in today’s media landscape, where news moves faster than a speeding bullet, forever doesn’t last long.)
