In the time since the shooting at a rally for Donald Trump this past weekend, some key facts have been uncovered, while many questions remain. Although one might hope that something we could call “the real story” will come into focus at some point, it was clear from the outset that there could never be any amount or type of evidence that would resolve to everyone’s satisfaction the issue of what truly happened.
This is a tragedy, because the hope of healing a divided nation rides in large part on everyone knowing what it is that we are trying to heal. The problem is that the very injuries that need to be healed will stop us from being able to return to robust health, as if a human body’s processes to heal its wounds only worsened the pain.
The Three Tragedies
In a Verdict column two days ago, “Three Tragedies of Political Violence,” I described three lessons that were immediately apparent after the shooting. The first tragedy is the most palpable, which is that there were real victims of the shooting. It is too easy to skip quickly past that part of the story, but we must never fail to remember the human cost.
The second tragedy is that our political system was already so damaged by violence and the threat of violence that even something shocking like this earth-shattering event seemed so unsurprising. The political system, like the legal system more generally, is the peaceful alternative to might making right and thus to cycles of violence and bloody retribution. The less we can count on everyone buying into the legitimacy of a system—especially when people do not achieve their immediate goals within that system—the more likely we are to see the entire system collapse.
Finally, I explained in Tuesday’s column why the toxicity of our political system will prevent us from reaching any agreement that would allow us to move forward in a trusting, good-faith environment.
In particular, I noted that we did not (and, as of this writing, do not) have any basis on which to say that this violence was in fact politically motivated at all. To be sure, the shooter’s violent acts have had immediate and profound political ramifications, and those will continue to echo for years if not decades into the future. Even so, and notwithstanding that the shooting has been officially deemed an assassination attempt, the word “assassination” does not necessarily imply a political component.
The website dictionary.com, for example, offers two definitions: (1) “the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person”; and (2) “the act of destroying or harming treacherously and viciously.” There is no doubt that the shooter attempted to do something fitting the first definition, and he unfortunately succeeded in an act that fits the second. But neither of those definitions involves politics, whether electoral or even ideological.
What I called the third tragedy, then, was that too many people are far too eager to describe this as a political plot, and once people are willing to go down that road, they become committed to rejecting any explanation that does not fit their narrative. This is evidence of the collapse of healthy politics.
The Fertile Ground for Conspiracy Theories in Anything Related to Trump
As I noted in my column on Tuesday, none of my analysis there took a position regarding the facts surrounding the events over the weekend. Instead, I explained how even a far less scary initial set of facts would—if they had to do with Donald Trump—lead too many people to reject inconvenient evidence and to go all in on conspiracy theories that are impervious to being disproved.
After all, I noted, if Trump had said at any point that he did not want to be President again, there would be people who would claim that he had been coerced by shadowy forces to act against his will, either through threats or brainwashing or some other kind of pressure. We would doubtless see videos of people showing how Trump seemed to be talking as if he were in a hostage video, with ancillary claims about money trails (which would surely be touted as leading to George Soros).
A political movement that continues to claim that “the Biden crime family” is engaged in influence peddling, even after years of failures to turn up evidence to prove it, is the same political movement that responded to failed investigations of the Benghazi tragedy by launching yet further investigations. (There were a total of six Republican-led investigations before they gave up.) Any small irrelevancy can be touted as a huge deal, once the conspiracy train is rolling.
And if the big news about Trump was not that he had dropped out of the race but instead that he had died, all bets would be off. In Tuesday’s column, I explained why even the least suspicious sequence of events—a heart attack, seen live on video, striking down an elderly man with multiple risk factors—would surely be met with its own set of conspiracy theories. Choose a favorite spy movie and then claim, say, that a person had put something in Trump’s skin toner, or that a strobe light had shined in his eyes, or that a person in the background who could be seen sneezing had in fact been blowing an invisible, poison mist in Trump’s direction. At that point, fed by the ongoing attack on expertise, no “official” autopsy would be widely accepted.
The Narratives Around the Real-World Attempt to Kill Trump
None of that, of course, happened in real life last weekend. Instead, the one thing that everyone immediately agreed upon was that someone had shot at Trump. And if I am right that even the least suspicious versions of anything bad happening to Trump would lead to disagreements over what truly happened, a shooting was surely going to heighten the intensity to levels previously unimaginable.
I care about my mental health too much to spend any time on social media, but I did not need to check Twitter or Instagram to know what would begin to happen immediately. And I learned later that, sure enough, only two hours later Senator J.D. Vance issued this statement: “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.”
To be clear, Vance’s factual premise is simply wrong, because the Biden campaign has never said anything like “at all costs” in the non-electoral sense. And it would be amusing if it were not so sad that a leader in a party that dismissively defends Trump’s celebrations of violence suddenly saw a cause-and-effect connection between political rhetoric and real-world violence. Moreover, Trump’s post-shooting statements that we should now be looking for “unity” makes it especially awkward that Vance was chosen to run for Vice President less than two days after he made that inflammatory statement.
Even so, Vance’s statement is not a conspiracy theory in the true sense of the term. He argued—quite unconvincingly, and with utter hypocrisy—that the Biden campaign definitively caused an act of stochastic political violence, even though he lacked even the most minimal basis for saying that the shooting was politically motivated at all, as I noted above. Similarly, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s statement that “[w]e are in a battle between good and evil; the Democrat Party is flat-out evil” is deeply sick, but she could have made such an insane claim even without saying that the Democratic Party directly or indirectly caused the shooter to do what he did.
As soon as the news of the shooting hit the internet, however, anyone with a pulse knew that unfounded conspiracy theories would begin to fly. Among those who dislike Trump, the term “Reichstag fire” reportedly began to trend on social media. Was that an example of non-MAGA conspiracy theorizing? Maybe, but maybe not.
For readers who might be unfamiliar with the relevant history, the Reichstag was the German parliament building in the pre-Nazi era. When the building burned down in 1933, the newly-installed Chancellor—Adolf Hitler—blamed the incident on communists and used that assertion as a pretext to suspend civil liberties. The fire was, therefore, “pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.”
It is notable, however, that “the origins of the fire are still unclear,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The only thing that is clear is that Hitler soon used the fire to justify a crackdown on his political enemies. He did not have to have planned the fire to exploit it opportunistically. The people who began on Saturday to push the Reichstag fire comparison might, therefore, have been saying not that there was a conspiracy to attempt to assassinate Trump but instead that the attempt—no matter its provenance—would lead predictably to Trump’s return to the White House and then to the enactment of the Trump/Republican authoritarian agenda to establish a one-party theocracy. That prediction is surely unwelcome to Republican Trump supporters, but it is not a conspiracy theory about the shooting.
The other reason to invoke the Reichstag fire, however, could be to assert that there truly was a conspiracy. This could have been a “false flag” operation, which is where one side in a conflict gains a strategic advantage by having its own people do something terrible while pretending to be their opponents. The idea is then to rally people against their evil enemies, allowing the true perpetrators to take on the mantle of righteous avengers.
Again, this idea started to circulate in those initial moments where the only known fact was that Trump had been grazed by a bullet in an apparent attempted murder. The false-flag theory did at least have some initial plausibility in that the shooting could not possibly help the Democrats. “Who gains from this?” is a useful question to ask, but it does not settle the issue by any means. And because these are all theories based on snippets of evidence, there is even the possibility that this was a false flag initiated not by Trump himself but by Republicans who viewed Trump as expendable in the service of consolidating their party’s power. Two versions of that theory—that the shooter had specifically been instructed to only graze Trump’s ear, or that the shooter was supposed to succeed in killing the target but failed—would explain the otherwise implausible assumption that Trump, were he in on it, would have been willing to trust that the shooter was a uniquely skilled marksman.
Thinking of theories like these is one thing, but committing to them and believing them against all evidence is quite another. Every bit of evidence that we have seen since Saturday has undermined any narrative that this was a false flag. (The available evidence is, however, irrelevant to the non-conspiratorial, opportunistic version of the Reichstag fire narrative.). Nothing about the shooter fits the false-flag story. Of course, for those who fervently want to believe that there was a conspiracy—on either the pro- or anti-Trump side—the theory could be mutated to say that there was a second shooter, a la the JFK assassination theories. Or, in the more lurid variations of conspiracy theories, we could imagine people confidently asserting that the 20-year-old shooter was a hypnotized zombie who had been manipulated into doing the deed and was supposed to be killed as part of the operation.
The problem with conspiracy theories, after all, is that there truly are conspiracies in the world. Once a person is committed to a story, however, that story can become its own self-reinforcing alternative reality. Whatever small possibility there was that people who dislike Trump would gravitate to the most extreme false-flag theories does, I am happy to report, seem to have dissipated with the emergence of new evidence.
But what if the facts had instead turned out to support the false-flag theory, rather than to undermine it? Much like my thoughts about how “Trump died of a heart attack” would very likely be rejected by people who would insist that he had been killed by conspirators, even if evidence had emerged showing truly culpable behavior—videos of planning sessions, money trails from Republicans to the killer—the toxic nature of the country’s political discourse would surely see people claiming that all of that evidence had been falsified by sinister actors.
It is worth noting that other conspiracy theories are in fact popping up everywhere. A person who attended Saturday’s rally told reporters that the security seemed suspiciously lax at the event, an assertion that feeds the idea that the Biden administration orchestrated everything. That theory is inconsistent with what we know about the shooter’s apparent isolation from outside influences—the Biden people could not have known to order that the security be weakened without knowing that there would be a shooter in the first place—but it took hold almost immediately and has “had legs” in the days since. It is one thing to ask if there were lapses from best practices, but this is a conspiracy theory in search of evidence.
In the end, then, this horrifying event will not merely be part of the toxic stew that has already made it nearly impossible to convince people with logic and evidence to update their beliefs. It is such a unique event, with such terrible implications, that no amount of evidence will convince Trump supporters that it was not an attempted political hit.
That in turn means that, if Trump loses the election in November, his most hardcore supporters will be even more likely to violently reject that result and attempt to reinstall their leader in office by any means necessary. And that would be the final tragedy.
