Bullets Cleanse Nothing

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump — an act repugnant to anyone who honors and values the ideas, habits, and practices of democracy — cleanses nothing.

Trump, a man of base character and a would-be authoritarian who disregards the norms of republican self-government while seeking to gain office by casting doubt on election results and promising to corruptly wield power against his perceived enemies, is the same person today that he was before someone tried to kill him.

Within hours of the attempt on his life, Trump’s supporters sought to use the shooting as a justification to tamp down criticism of the former president and to render it taboo to continue to honestly describe Trump as the mean, illiberal politician he’s proudly been over the last decade.

Senator J.D. Vance, who hopes to be named as Trump’s running mate, posted on social media that accusing Trump of being “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” is what “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Senator Tim Scott, another vice presidential hopeful, said the shooter was “aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

Some Republican officeholders went further.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called the Democratic Party “flat out evil” and said it “tried to murder President Trump,” while Congressman Mike Collins called on the district attorney where the shooting occurred to file charges against President Joe Biden and claimed that Biden “sent the orders” to try to kill Trump.

These statements were made before the shooter’s identity was known, which suggests these politicians were not interested in the truth, but in furthering a crude partisan narrative fueled by rage. We now know the gunman was a registered Republican. Investigators still don’t know his motive. (Trump, to his credit, posted on social media after the shooting that Americans should “stand united,” an exceedingly rare call for unity from someone who thrives on sewing discord. Perhaps like Scrooge after his visit by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, this experience will change Trump.)

The proposed directive is clear: Those of us who see Trump as a threat to the American project should stop saying so.

But why? Trump is a threat to American democracy. He conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and when those efforts failed, he encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol to try to prevent the peaceful transition of power. Trump describes as “hostages” those people who were criminally charged for heeding his call.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Trump has refused to say if he will accept the results, and, in an effort to serve his own selfish ends by further eroding public confidence in our elections, he and his supporters are already saying the contest will be rigged. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump promises a “bloodbath” if he isn’t elected and baselessly predicts that if he loses, there will be no more elections in America.

If he is elected, Trump and his allies promise to deploy the military throughout the country in the name of controlling immigration and fighting crime; gutting the government of non-partisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists; rounding up and prosecuting political opponents; and generally working to install a regime of Christian nationalism that will denigrate the promises of equality and freedom that define American democracy at its best. About this, we’re told, we needn’t worry too much because Trump has vowed to behave as a dictator only on day one.

The shots fired in Pennsylvania do not wash away any of this. They change nothing, including the right and duty to continue describing Trump as he actually is. A would-be assassin creates no obligation to indulge credulity before the plain evidence of Trump’s stated intentions, nor does a shooting require us to now go quiet: To allow a gunman to silence honest political criticism would be to grant vigilantes of all sorts a heckler’s veto.

Nevertheless, in the home stretch of a heated presidential campaign, Trump’s supporters hope that in the name of good taste, we’ll temper our critiques.

Therein lies the asymmetry that democrats inevitably confront when fighting against ambitious, illiberal authoritarians who disregard any command to behave decently: We want to do the right thing and do not subject every question of human behavior to political calculation. For that reason, democrats are aghast at an attempted assassination, no matter the target. This shooting disturbs us just as the violence of January 6 disturbed us: Such episodes confound our sincerest understanding of what we think we are or hope we can be as a political community. They give us pause because they cause us pain, and they do all of this because we instinctively understand and endorse a simple truth: This violence is wrong, an idea that means little to those who reject the virtues necessary for good self-government and instead reduce everything along their pathway to power to narrow questions of interest or advantage.

So, for example, when an intruder broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house and bludgeoned her aged husband, Paul, with a hammer, Trump joked about it because he thought doing so would play well among his supporters, who subscribe to Trump’s view of the former Speaker of the House as a “crazed lunatic.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Jr. mocked Mr. Pelosi on social media with a meme suggesting the violent assault was a homosexual hook-up gone bad, and conservative activist Charlie Kirk sought an “amazing patriot” to bail out the man who attacked Pelosi. Here at home, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who’s now the GOP nominee for governor, also posted a homophobic meme that mocked Pelosi.

For some, it seems, political violence deserves condemnation only after consulting the victim’s party registration. (While it would be wrong to characterize this phenomenon as a “both sides” problem — I’m not aware of a single prominent Democrat who has mocked Trump the way some prominent Republicans mocked Paul Pelosi — it can’t help but be true that some such people reside within the Democratic Party or on the political left. They, too, deserve our criticism.)

Others are built differently: We condemn political violence like that unleashed against Trump because we believe deeply in the practices and values of a properly functioning democracy, including open debate, free and fair elections, and the imperative to recognize the equality of all people before the law and the dignity of all people before their fellow citizens. We believe in the right of the people to govern themselves without the threat or experience of violence. We believe ballots should replace bullets in guiding our common lives and that a society is not truly open until it is truly non-violent.

These ethical commitments are not equally shared by a man who brazenly lies and cruelly mocks; who described attendees of a neo-Nazi rally as “very fine people”; who told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”; who mused aloud about shooting protesters and immigrants; who called reporters “the enemy of the American people”; and who regularly characterizes some people as inhuman “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Nor, it can be reasonably inferred, are they equally shared by voters who support such a man, many of whom have hailed the merits of “Second Amendment solutions” to political problems and fetishized as a political prop the very kind of deadly weapon apparently used to try to kill the former president — and who are now feigning shock that a gun could become a tool of political action.

Immediately after the attempt on Trump’s life, prominent Democrats across the country, up to and including President Biden and former President Barack Obama, unequivocally condemned the shooting, as they should have. At the same time, prominent Trump supporters, seeing an opportunity to score points or gain a political edge, indulged partisanship, using the moment not to stand against all political violence, including the violence espoused for years by their nominee, but to seek to silence Trump’s critics by assigning them blame for a lone gunman’s actions, all while furthering the persecution complex that lies at the heart of Trump’s political identity.

Rightly shaken by events, we democrats may feel some inclination to pause our criticism, an admirable feeling borne of a desire to “turn the rhetoric down,” as Speaker Mike Johnson suggested. But to do so at the cost of muffling honest criticism would be to misunderstand the moment and assist those who loudly proclaim their plans to undermine the republic: We are months away from a presidential election featuring a candidate who has publicly pledged to remake the character of American government and who rejects the values we associate with our country’s highest aspirations. Our duty is not to endorse, in the name of sentimental comity, a course of phony, one-sided civility that allows the vicious to scheme unchallenged. Instead, our obligation remains to tell the truth, even when it defies the simple narratives of narrow partisans: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was wrong, and Donald Trump remains a dire threat to the American republic.