Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was a dreadful, unspeakable event. It is just the latest blow to America’s already shaky hold on democracy and the rule of law.
Assassination of someone campaigning for the highest office in the land is a direct assault on the right of every voter to choose who they want to represent them. Democracy requires that citizens and leaders eschew political violence used to silence anyone, especially those whose views we find the most repugnant.
It also requires that we tolerate the widest possible range of views and respect the votes of even those who choose candidates we abhor. Democracy cannot survive if we subvert elections whose results we do not like.
I do not mean to equate an assassination attempt with an attempt to steal an election, but rather to explore the ways they both undermine democracy.
Let’s start with the despicable attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the first of its kind in the social media era.
As the New York Times notes, “While there were unsuccessful assassination attempts, incidents or plots targeting George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama during or after their terms, Mr. Trump was the first current or former president wounded in an act of violence since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 by a would-be assassin trying to impress a Hollywood actress.”
While it is too early to know exactly why 20-year-old registered Republican Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir is right to say that “no one in America can truly be surprised by each new outbreak of mayhem and bloodshed, whether it occurs on the streets of a large city, inside a rural church or a suburban big-box retail store, or at a presidential campaign rally in post-industrial western Pennsylvania.”
As O’Hehir notes, “To a large extent, we never really know what drives people to commit acts of irrational violence — or, to put it more accurately, we are overloaded with too many reasons, and we all get to pick the ones that support our existing worldview. So it will be, unhappily for our rapidly decomposing polity, with this apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump.”
O’Hehir gives us a vivid example of the way that the assassination attempt already is eroding our already frayed political system. “It wasn’t surprising,” he argues, “that as soon as reports emerged that shots had been fired at Trump, social media erupted with outlandish allegations that Joe Biden had ordered a hit on his nemesis or, conversely, that the incident was a false-flag operation meant to cast blame on Trump-hating liberals and provoke a wave of sympathy for the recently convicted ex-president.”
I got a taste of the way this is playing out by watching Fox News coverage of the events in Pennsylvania. Sean Hannity quickly tried to turn it into a political advantage for Trump, noting his courage and fighting spirit. America, Hannity said, needs that kind of leadership.
But he didn’t stop there. He blamed the attack on the overheated rhetoric used by President Biden to brand Trump an enemy of democracy and to blast the media for labeling the former President a “fascist.”
He was joined in this line of attack by Laura Ingraham, who could barely contain her anger at Democrats, and by Newt Gingrich, who, appealing to a religious audience, called the fact that Trump survived the attack an “act of providence.” Vivek Ramaswamy joined Gingrich in saying that “God intervened today to save not just Donald Trump’s life but the life of this country.”
Some Republicans politicians have faulted President Biden for saying at a fundraising event that “It’s time to put Donald Trump in a bullseye.” Senator J.D. Vance wasted no time in saying that “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
While the former President said on Sunday that “it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” his allies are singing from a different hymnal.
How ironic that people who have stoked fear and hatred as their political brand and called President Biden every name in the book are now blaming him for fomenting violence? How ironic that just hours before the attack in Pennsylvania, Biden called for a ban on assault weapons (or the kind that were used to shoot Trump) and universal background checks.
Instead of rallying the nation and joining Trump in calling for unity in a time of national crisis, the forces of political division are already at work. How much more political sectarianism can American democracy take?
Beyond these immediate reactions we know that in other putative democracies, as political scientist Paul Staniland notes, “electoral competition is intertwined with violence.”
In those places, Staniland says, “Pro-state militias target the supporters of opposition parties; states use security forces to repress dissidents and intimidate the electorate; political parties build armed wings; insurgents attack voters and candidates; and local elites use elections as a front for pursuing feuds and rivalries. In a world where the formal mechanisms of electoral politics have become de rigueur, the grim intersection of violence and voting is the central challenge.”
In Staniland’s view, “It is remarkable how wide-ranging electoral violence is (and how) important and broad the politics of violence are. Electoral violence can undermine representation, build coercion and brutality into everyday political practice, shape regime- and state-building, and fuel insurgencies, local private armies, and security force politicization.”
America is not there yet, but the signs are ominous.
According to an article in the New York Times, a nationwide poll conducted last month “found that 10 percent of those surveyed said that the ‘use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ A third of those who gave that answer also said they owned a gun…. Seven percent of those surveyed said they ‘support force to restore Trump to the presidency.’ Half of them said they owned guns.”
The Times quotes political scientist Robert Pape, who argues that “The shooting at Mr. Trump’s rally ‘is a consequence of such significant support for political violence in our country.’ Indeed,” the Times notes, “significant lone wolf attacks motivated by political violence have been growing for years in the United States, against members of Congress from both parties as well as federal officials and national leaders.”
So pervasive is the looming threat of political violence that “In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found nearly 14 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years.”
Fortune quotes Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, who argues that Americans’ “‘willingness to use political violence may be highest since the Civil War.’”
And even if we get through the rest of the 2024 campaign with no more violence directed at the presidential candidates, it is very likely that what happened to Trump will stoke the already “ongoing onslaught of violent messages, particularly to federal lawmakers and other public officials” that CNN says “threatens to disrupt the American machinery of government.”
Those threats, CNN reminds us, “have also recently targeted election officials.” They are “‘perhaps the most dangerous hate crimes…. They’re really scary because they can take down a democracy.’”
Moreover, we can have little confidence that after the votes are counted in November that calm will prevail. As the New York Times reported on Saturday, “The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.”
The Times says that “unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.” The GOP is following “a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses…. At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.”
Like the assassination attempt on the former President, the continuing effort to undermine confidence in elections is an assault on democracy (even if it is clothed in the rhetoric of seeking to protect election integrity).
In the end, every American should want all of us to be able to vote for the candidate of our choice and have that choice respected, no matter what it is. Saturday’s assassination attempt and the unfolding effort to contest the election result if Biden wins is a reminder how far we are from seeing that wish fulfilled.
