‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Winston Churchill’s observation is a useful place to start in attempting to interpret the consequences of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The shot that nearly killed the former president wasn’t completely without result, but mercifully the flesh wound it inflicted seems to have left Mr Trump with no lasting physical damage. Its mental and political ramifications – for him and for the country at large – are sure to be greater.
It is human nature for such a trauma to produce a psychic transformation in the intended victim, and no one could blame Mr Trump for feeling, as Churchill did, a renewed sense of purpose and a belief that Providence had spared him for his greater mission.
The former president’s immediate display of courage and defiance is an eloquent political message of its own. But there are wider considerations we should ponder. Specifically, there are a few lessons conservatives should be careful not to take from this horrifying episode and at least one big lesson we should absorb.
First, we should resist the temptation to ascribe Mr Trump’s survival to divine intervention –and to interpret it as some providential endorsement of the Republican nominee.
Some Republicans have already gone this route. “I personally believe that God intervened today, not just on behalf of President Trump but on behalf of our country,” Vivek Ramaswamy said in a Fox News interview.
No one should deny Mr Trump his understandable sense of providentially supplied deliverance. People of faith, and even sometimes those of no prior faith, are often convinced by near-death experiences that they have been preserved by some higher spiritual power.
But while those of us who call ourselves believers accept the idea of divine intervention in human affairs – otherwise why pray? – there is a dangerous difference between belief that divine mercy can work in seemingly random ways and thinking that the Father of the universe stopped by a Pennsylvania field to bestow eternal blessings on the MAGA agenda.
If you doubt that, consider the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust and the countless others murdered by the Nazis, and ask if God intervened on numerous occasions to spare Adolf Hitler from the various bombs and bullets that could have prevented or mitigated that atrocity. Let’s leave God’s plans to himself for now.
The next thing we should resist is conspiracy theorising. Again, in the first 24 hours after the shooting, some Republicans went there. “Joe Biden sent the orders,” Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia tweeted.
We’ve come to expect this kind of noise from the farmyard corner of Congress. More troubling was Elon Musk, who posited on his own platform that this might have been a state-sponsored act: “Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate.”
It is a symptom of how corroded the basis of our common epistemological ground has become that a man who has become one of the richest in the history of the planet by applying reason, logic and science to human challenges, should be among the first to postulate emotionally generated theories built on cloud castles and mental effluent.
The circumstances of the shooting must be investigated, and at first blush it looks as if there were dreadful security lapses. But the suggestion that the Secret Service or other law-enforcement arms of what the fever swamps of the far right like to call “the regime” might think they would get away with murdering the leading candidate for president is a proposition for psychological evaluation, not intellectual deliberation.
A third lesson will be more controversial to some: Avoid the idea that, even if they didn’t actually pull the trigger, Democrats are somehow to blame because of their rhetoric.
It’s true that the language about Mr Trump and the Republicans is often absurdly overblown: the recent ululations about Project 2025 are a case in point.
But it must be within the bounds of acceptable political discourse to claim that Mr Trump represents a threat to democracy, not least because some of his behaviour and rhetoric support the claim. So is it acceptable for Mr Trump and Republicans to say that President Biden and the Democrats are destroying America without it being interpreted as a signal to anyone with a rifle to take out the Democratic candidate.
If there is room for emotional restraint in the aftermath of this horror, there is also reason to hope for a small movement toward de-escalating the mutual loathing to which so many Americans have fallen prey.
We’ve had a taste of where this leads – the near-assassination of a presidential candidate and the anarchy that might have ensued – as well as the actual murder of a man, a rally attendee who merely wanted to be a political participant.
If we can channel Mr Trump’s personal courage, the nation’s unified horror at this latest descent into anarchy, and the common creeping sensation we all must have of a nation edging ever closer to the abyss, we might remind ourselves that some things really are more important than indulging the destructive pleasure so many seem to feel at nursing their fetid grievances.
The Wall Street Journal
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