Just two days before the Republican National Convention commences to formally nominate Donald Trump for a third presidential bid, a gunman attempted to assassinate the former president during a Pennsylvania rally.
After a stunning round of audible gun shots, Trump was evidently a single inch from death, with a bullet appearing to graze his ear and bloody his face. But Trump, who briefly hid for safety beneath the podium, emerged defiant with a fist pumped as his Secret Service detail huddled around him to corral him off to safety.
According to a senior government official, Trump is safe. But democracy is not. In fact, more than Russian trolls or 2020 election truthers could ever dream of achieving, the attempt to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee is actually the single greatest threat to our democratic experiment.
The Republican Party establishment, which pissed away more than $200 million on primary challengers other than Trump, did not want the former president to win the nomination for a third time in a row. But the voters unequivocally did. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters, or 17 million Americans, voted for Trump. That’s 3 million more than the Democrats who voted for the incumbent president.
Joe Biden, of course, was safely cocooned by the Democratic Party, which cancelled presidential primaries outright in two states and blocked his challengers from appearing in other states, while the media pretended he did not succumb to the senility exposed at his disaster of a debate performance against Trump late last month.
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Criminal law correctly maintains a very narrow definition for the incitement of violence. And even in common parlance, we don’t hold political agitators directly or personally responsible for raising the temperature of a discourse. But two troubling truths cannot be denied.
First, assassinating the democratically elected candidate for either party is tantamount to disenfranchising an entire half of the American electorate. That is what was one inch away from reality on a sweltering Saturday in Pennsylvania.
Second, this attempted murder of Trump cannot be considered in a vacuum. Those who have deemed Trump the pre-eminent danger to democracy and demonized him beyond the norms of opposition to policy or character may not be responsible for the actual attempt on his life, but reckless demagoguery is responsible for normalizing neutralizing Trump by any means necessary.
Impeachment failed twice, and four separate criminal cases against Trump seem unlikely to fulfill their intended purpose of locking the former president up before Election Day. When one man has been cast as the Big Bad, the existential threat to humanity’s first and last enforcer of the consent of the governed, someone will take such rhetoric both literally and seriously, and the promise of violently ending Trump’s candidacy to its logical conclusion.