Like everybody else, I have been having thoughts about the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. It took me a while to gather those thoughts into something like publishable form.
The Shot
When I first heard he’d been hustled off the stage by Secret Service agents, I didn’t think much of it. I assumed they were just being cautious after receiving a warning or something.
The next rumor was that Trump had been hit with a pellet gun. That would be a reason to hustle him away. And I found a picture of him apparently bleeding from the side of the head, which looked like the sort of minor injury you could get from an air gun pellet: Skin damage, but no real penetration. The video of him grabbing the side of his head made sense too. Kind of. But he was turned to his right, so the shooter would have to be in the crowd behind him, and I saw no sign of that — no threatening motions, no struggle for a gun in the crowd, no Secret Service agents wading in to nab the attacker…
Then I heard someone say there were multiple popping noises. Most air guns are not capable of repeating fire, and I doubt you could hear them over the noise of the crowd or from very far away. That sounded more like a firearm. But almost any bullet striking the side of the head directly would have done a lot more damage, so the shot had to be a grazing shot fired from in front of him or behind, from stage left or stage right.
Finally, I got the reporting that it was AR-15 fire from a nearby rooftop. Damn. Just imagine being Trump: You turn to your right for a moment, and straight in front of you a shooter more than a football field away starts firing at you with an AR-15. One of those 5.56mm bullets crosses the distance in less than 1/5 of a second, arriving at your head traveling more than two thousand feet per second. And it just clips your ear.
Jesus Christ, Trump got lucky. An inch or so in the wrong direction and the bullet would have gone into his brain.
I remember the first time I ever shot an AR-15, firing 5 shots at 100 yards. I put 3 rounds into the 10-ring, which was smaller than a human head. I did that with a scope from a resting position — lying down with the front of the rifle sitting on a solid object. This was not a difficult shot. Other people who were familiar with AR-15s agreed: As a technical matter, shooting Trump should have been easy. Especially if the shooter practiced it a few hundred times in preparation, knowing it would be the most important shot of his (about to be short) life.
So why did he miss?
Probably because shooting in the real world is harder than shooting at the range. When I pulled the trigger on my rifle, I wasn’t trying to commit murder. He was. He was also able to look out and see, off the left, the Secret Service sniper team that would almost certainly kill him within seconds. That’s got to mess with your aim.
I’m now hearing that he was interrupted by a police officer just before firing. He supposedly pointed his rifle at the officer to back him off and then pivoted and started shooting at Trump. Being forced to fire in haste probably contributed to him missing Trump.
Trump, once again, got very lucky.
I remember being surprised that with shots being fired at a distance, there were no reports of anyone in the crowd getting hit. That seemed like more good luck. Until the report that three other people had been hit and one of them was dead.
The Shooter
I remember that some Twitter folks were claiming the shooter was an as an Antifa activist. They even had his picture. But they didn’t have his name. Naturally, this turned out to be bogus.
And as you’d expect, lots of people on the right were blaming this on anti-Trump rhetoric coming from Biden, the Democrats, and other Trump opposition, even though they couldn’t possibly know. This kind of bullshit happens every time there’s a shooting. When Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot in a supermarket parking lot in Arizona in 2011, people where quick to blame right-wing rhetoric, but the shooter turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic who was obsessed with Giffords. When a gunman shot over 100 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, many people assumed it was an anti-gay hate crime, but the best evidence indicates the shooter was trying to retaliate against the U.S. for airstrikes in the middle east, and he had no idea that the Pulse nightclub was a gay bar. Trying to kill the President is not a normal thing, so don’t assume it happens for “normal” reasons.
More to the point, madmen are madmen. It’s hard to predict what will set them off. Charles Manson famously touched off a killing spree over a Beatles song about an amusement park ride. Politicians, pundits, and bloggers who talk about politics should not have to worry about how some one-in-a-million madman will interpret their writing. That’s no way to live your life.
The shooter has now been identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who lived less than an hour’s drive from the Trump rally. Rumor has it that he’s a registered Republican, he has expressed interest in conservative politics, and yet he has donated to liberal causes. All of that, if true, could mean anything or nothing.
The Secret Service
One of the mysteries of this shooting has been why the Secret Service snipers didn’t see the shooter on the roof and stop him before he could open fire. Putting together a couple of threads, I think I have an answer.
As I gather it, the Secret Service threw three rings of protection around Trump:
- The inner ring: These are the agents that surrounded Trump and guarded the immediate entrances and exits to the secure area.
- The medium range ring: These are the points outside the secure area where a shooter could threaten Trump. They are individually secured by on-the-ground personnel.
- The far range, too large an area to secure every building. These are observed by the Secret Service counter-sniper team.
The inner and outer rings are protected by Secret Service agents who have the necessary skills to work on Trump’s protective detail or take sniper shots at bad guys. The medium range ring is basically just guarding buildings, which is something regular law enforcement officers can do.
The shooter was on a building in the medium range ring, which should have been guarded by local law enforcement. It wasn’t the sniper team’s job to observe it for threats. It would only be a distraction from their assigned duties. They needed to stay focused on the unguarded buildings in the distance.
The latest reports say that the building the shooter fired from was actually a staging area for local police. How he got past all those cops has yet to be explained.
The Target
I’ve been worried about Trump being assassinated since he first took office. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the son of a bitch, and I don’t want him to be President, but I’ve been worried that his enemies would resort to something awful to stop him. Although shooting our Presidents is a time-honored tradition here in the United States, it’s really not how democracy is supposed to work.
Right-wing commentators have tried to blame this shooting on anti-Trump rhetoric, such as the overblown assertion that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That’s only a moderately good point at best — overblown rhetoric is the language of political campaign season — and it doesn’t work at all if Trump really is a threat to democracy, as a lot of people believe he is.
Personally, I don’t think Trump will destroy our democracy…but not for lack of trying: The Trump team filed numerous baseless lawsuits against the election outcome, set up fake slates of electors, and on January 6, 2021, some of them broke into the Capitol to try to stop Biden’s electoral votes from being counted. And as I’ve been writing this, Trump just picked J. D. Vance as his Vice President. Vance is a well-known follower of Curtis Yarvin, whose neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment philosophy advocates replacing American democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy. So maybe, just maybe, Trump and his people are a threat to democracy?
Finally, let’s not forget that during a protest outside the White House, Trump had suggested shooting the protesters. He wanted to shoot my fellow Americans. His own fellow Americans.
Well Donald, you just got a taste of how that works. Reap what you sow, motherfucker.
“That’s only a moderately good point at best — overblown rhetoric is the language of political campaign season — and it doesn’t work at all if Trump really is a threat to democracy, as a lot of people believe he is.”
This is perhaps an underrated point, although maybe not how you considered it – It forces people to either own or abandon their rhetoric over the last few years: If you truly, genuinely believe that Donald Trump is the second coming of Hitler, and his second election will usher in a Naziesque administration that will usher in an authoritarian regime unlike any before seen… Well, you should be most upset that the shooter missed. Maybe secondarily upset that it’ll mean a bump in his polls.
There’s a particularly mealy-mouthed routine where people will have catastrophized Trump’s second term, projecting their head-cannon, all the worst things they can possibly think of, onto the man immediately before shifting back to “Well, yeah, I know I said all those things, but we really shouldn’t shoot people, thoughts and prayers.”
And was this always the case? I don’t know… I was born in ’85. Like you alluded, there was a whole lot more political violence in the decades before I was born than there was after, and I think we’ve gotten complacent in our expectation that politics are largely bloodless.
There’s this thing that’s done in politics where signals are sent out that lead to an instinctual response. Like how ducks know when to migrate or salmon know when to spawn, where people know when it’s time to Be Afraid. Not because there’s anything to Be Afraid of, but because fear is a motivator, it motivates them to vote, it motivates them to motivate other people to vote, it motivates donations, it motivates displays of support. That fear has ratcheted us up to a point where it’s emotionally exhausting to care about politics, it’s why I’ve taken a few steps back over the last few years, and frankly, I’m surprised it took this long to get here. The lessons learned from the Gifford and Salise shootings were far too temporary, and I’ve been saying for years that it’s only a matter of time before someone got shot.
Time after time, we are told a plethora of horrifying things that the other side is going to do, only for them to form government and have those fears go unrealized for another four years. And then at the end of those four years, the same people with a few more grey hairs will trot out the exact same set of fears to rile their people up again, only to be treated with the exact same level of seriousness.
I honestly don’t know what you do about it.
Hmm. It feels to me like there has been a rhetorical heightening of the stakes in the last dozen years or so. Democrats accuse Trump of wanting to destroy democracy, and Trump accuses Biden of wanting to destroy America. Candidates have always criticized each other, but it seems to have gotten more apocalyptic lately.
That could be entirely subjective. Maybe it was always that bad and I just didn’t used to pay that much attention, or I used to ignore it.
But if it’s real, I’m tempted to think part of it has to do with the rise of online fundraising, where a larger number of people give relatively small amounts. Getting the attention of less politically interested doners requires short but alarming messages — Be Afraid, as you say. The Other Guy Will Kill Your Family and Everything You Love. Then again, we had the Goldwater Will Kill Us All “Daisy” ad sixty years ago.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is if the left labels every Republican candidate as the next Hitler, that will make it harder to recognize the real next Hitler when he comes along. The same, of course, goes for the next Karl Marx/Stalin/Mao.
That brings me back to Trump. And just because people say crazy things about how bad he is doesn’t mean he isn’t bad. He really does worry me more than any previous serious candidate. I’ve had a few run-ins with sociopaths over the years, and have been lucky to extract myself and my family from some bad (although non-violent) situations. Trump strikes me as a blatant sociopath, more so than any recent candidate.
Then again, perhaps he is simply worse at hiding it.