Approximately two minutes after I saw the news about the shooting at the Trump rally this past Saturday, my initial shock was replaced by the terrible realization that people will never even agree about what happened. Because my writings here on Verdict and on Dorf on Law tend to focus on worst-case scenarios, it was natural for me to think about how bad the reactions to the shooting will be. Although I am sometimes regarded as an alarmist, at this moment no one can fail to hear the alarm bells ringing.
Therefore, I want to focus in this column on three tragic aspects of what just happened. On Thursday of this week, I will write about a fourth tragedy, which is the political impact of the shooting. It seems important in this moment, however, to focus initially not on the admittedly necessary question of how this might affect the way people think about political events in the U.S. Violence is always a tragedy with many causes and effects, and violence in the political arena can be especially complicated and disastrous. But it is tragic in every sense.
The sad reality is that we have reached the point where nothing good can be seen on the horizon, even as we are reminded forcefully how awful the current moment is. And that is, no matter what else one might think about American politics, a tragedy.
The Personal Tragedy: Violence Has Real Victims
One person attending the rally died, and two are grievously injured. They are unambiguously innocent victims. The shooter is also dead, after doing something that most of us find inexplicable. Depending on facts that are currently unknown (and that might never be known), the shooter could be anything from a remorseless killer to a victim of larger forces.
At a minimum, then, we have three people who did nothing to bring violence upon themselves. Three lives have either ended or been permanently changed by violence. Because of the state of the world, it is easy to become desensitized to the death and suffering of innocents. Even when the numbers of victims reach into the tens and hundreds of thousands, we become dulled rather than enraged by the escalating numbers of lost and damaged human lives. That is true for nonviolent tragedies as well, such as COVID-related deaths or background-noise deaths from things like automobile accidents and suicides. We lose the ability to maintain our shock and grief over longer periods of time, even when the situation becomes worse rather than better.
Because of that, it is essential to immerse ourselves in this moment, when the human element of the tragedy is most palpable. Within hours (at most) of the news breaking about this story, everyone had moved on to thinking about the political angle. I certainly was unable to stop my mind from racing in that direction, too. I thus say this to everyone, including myself: Stop and think about how tragic this is. Humanity is worth celebrating and cherishing, and losing even one human being—especially to violence, but no matter the reason—is a reason to cry.
The Background Tragedy: Political Violence Happens Because We Have Failed
In an interview on Sunday morning, Senator Bernie Sanders said that politics should be “boring.” He explained that, as much as he cares about issues like health care and social inequality (and there is no doubt that he cares deeply about those and other issues), those discussions are necessarily dull.
He is right. A good, healthy political environment is one in which people become animated about eyes-glaze-over arguments regarding medical-care financing or the vagaries of progressive taxation and dynastic wealth. And I say that not because I happen to have spent my career as an academic studying those very subjects, because there are plenty of other subjects about which I know nothing (epidemiology, say, or earthquake readiness) that are just as boring but just as essential for us to get right. Instead, I say it because it is true. Only when we have the luxury of being boring do we know that we are in a good place.
Relatedly, I have always tried to remind myself of the powerful fact that the legal system is the most importantly boring foundation of a healthy society. Shakespeare’s famous line, “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers,” is notoriously misunderstood as a slam against attorneys. Even though there is some disagreement about its true meaning, I agree with those who view it as a recognition that the legal system stands as a bulwark against the arbitrary abuse of power by lawless autocrats—and, possibly more importantly, as our only defense against anarchy.
Even four centuries ago, it was obvious that the legal system’s very boringness was what made it so important. Why? Consider the alternative. People in the U.S. (and often in other places) complain that the country is “lawsuit happy,” acting as if the supposed surfeit of litigation is evidence that people are fighting over minor things. (And I do mean “supposed,” because a lot of the lore about all of this is merely that: lore.) TV shows like “The People’s Court” have long fed the notion that people are simply being nitpicky with each other and filling the courts with nuisance actions.
But again, what is the alternative? If we did not have a system in which people could see their grievances settled in court, would everyone who is angry enough to sue or press criminal charges simply throw up their hands and say, “Oh well, there’s nothin’ I can do about it”? Some people might, but if even a small percentage did not, what would they do instead? Given the country’s lack of a robust ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) system, the only other way to “get justice” would be to take the law into one’s own hands, either violently or by stealing from those who we think have wronged us. Not only would that sometimes mean that the wrong person was punished by a victim who did not wait to learn the facts and find the true wrongdoer, but even when the perpetrator was correctly identified, we would see instances in which the punishment did not fit the crime. And that is a recipe for an endless series of increasingly extreme reprisals.
When we cannot rely on the rule of law in our everyday interactions, we therefore are left with the choice of either turning the other cheek or fighting back. When we lose the rule of law in our political interactions, we lose something arguably even more precious. The very fact of politically inspired violence is evidence that our political system cannot channel our differences into peaceful resolutions. When a political movement, for example, convinces itself that the other side cannot possibly win an election by campaigning with a more appealing message but only by cheating, then the threat of political violence rises.
We have, of course, seen more than a few instances of this in American history, with what seems unmistakably to be an acceleration in recent years. The January 6, 2021, insurrection is obviously the most potent and frightening example, but the current century alone has seen lethal attacks on the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, and other violence that is motivated by the rejection of the idea that “working through the system” makes sense.
The second tragedy of the shooting last Saturday, then, is that it is both shocking and somehow utterly unsurprising. In its details, no one could have predicted it. That it fits so readily into the current arc of politically relevant violence, however, tells us that we were already living in a world that needs to be moved in a better direction. The shooting at the rally took us unmistakably in a worse direction.
The Existential Tragedy: Knowing Already that We Will Never Agree About What Just Happened
Careful readers might have noticed that I have crafted some phrases in this column that are almost deliberately awkward. In the paragraph just above, for example, I described what happened over the weekend as “politically relevant violence.” Why did I describe the shooting with passive language and without ascribing a political motive? Why not call it politically inspired violence? What, a reasonable person might ask, could be more politically inspired than shooting at a presidential candidate (who was once the President of the United States)?
The simple answer is that there is not enough information available (at least as I write this column) to know what the shooter was thinking or trying to accomplish. What seems obvious right now might turn out not to be true.
Many years ago, for example, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather was attacked on the street by two men, one an apparently deranged man who said more than once: “What is the frequency, Kenneth?” For quite some time before that incident, Rather had been an unpopular figure on the political right (having tangled publicly with then-President Richard Nixon during Watergate), and it was easy to imagine that the attack was inspired by someone who hated Rather for his left-leaning views. It turned out, however, that the assailant was a deranged man who thought that TV signals were destroying his brain, and the attack was not about politics but mental delusions. Similarly, the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981 turned out to be motivated by the shooter’s desire to impress a young actress, not by political goals.
My point here is twofold. First, almost anything is possible when it comes to explaining this kind of unique event. Second, however, unlike almost every other mystery, it is a near certainty that our political environment is so toxic that we will never reach consensus about what truly happened, or why.
After all, we have people who to this day ignore the absence of any evidence that Trump lost the 2020 election due to “voting irregularities.” In fact, the absence of such evidence is viewed by some as proof that the nefarious elites who supposedly pulled off the theft of the election are powerful enough to get their way. If they were capable of being sloppy and leaving behind evidence, how would those malevolent string-pullers have been able to rig the system in their favor in the first place?
Once we have people who succumb to motivated thinking, all bets are off. In my next column, I will go into some detail regarding the types of theories that are already running amok in the social and political media, focusing on how easy it is for any theory to become non-refutable. Before getting there, however, it will be helpful to explain just how broken our shared-reality system already had become, long before Saturday’s shooting. The third tragedy, again, is that we cannot even use evidence and human reasoning to move ourselves to a better place.
What Would Have Happened If There Had Been a Nonviolent Tragedy?
As I noted at the beginning of this column, a large part of my body of work involves thinking through extreme possibilities, especially worst-case scenarios. Most prominently, my columns here on Verdict have seen me arguing that the U.S. is a “dead democracy walking” and variations on that theme, then going further and asking what a post-constitutional America would look like.
But worst-case reasoning can be useful even in more limited contexts. In another Verdict column last week, for example, I listed some of the things that could have happened to President Joe Biden on June 27 that were worse than his very bad “non-debate” performance. Those hypothetical alternatives included health “episodes” up to and including his death.
Over the past few years, I had also pondered what might happen if Trump were to have a serious health crisis, and especially what might happen if he had died. Fortunately, I had not had reason until now to write up those thoughts into a column, but here we are.
What was striking to me as I thought through those various tragic scenarios was that the political environment, in particular on the Trumpist right, guaranteed that any chain of events that ended in Trump’s death would have the same outcome: some, perhaps most, of Trump’s followers would believe that he had been killed by his political enemies.
There is no need to run through a series of decreasingly suspicious circumstances surrounding the hypothetical death to make the point, because we can simply think about the most innocent of circumstances. Imagine that Trump, in the middle of a political speech in which he was animated and shouting for over an hour in extreme heat and humidity, were to suddenly clutch his chest and collapse dead on the stage. Would that be enough to make people accept a coroner’s conclusion that he had died of a massive heart attack?
One might think so, given that Trump is a 78-year-old man with obvious risk factors that put him especially at risk of heart problems. Some people might even think it surprising that someone in his circumstances had not already suffered such a fate. And if a team of independent forensic pathologists carried out a full investigation and declared that the death was from natural causes, then why would we not all be able to set aside our different feelings about Trump and say that sometimes nature takes its course?
Anyone paying even a modicum of attention to U.S. politics knows the answer to that question. Of course there would be large numbers of people who would reject that explanation! They would insist that there are no “independent” experts, or even if there are, that they can be compromised by the shadowy elites who supposedly exist and supposedly want to take Trump out. And even if the autopsy was honest, people would be looking at every frame of film to see whether, say, the person who last shook Trump’s hand before the speech had killed him with an untraceable toxin, injected via a small needle protruding from a wedding ring. Or perhaps the caterers would suddenly be “proved” to be agents sent by George Soros and Bill Gates to poison Trump’s last meal.
Sound outlandish? Everyone has seen plots like these in any number of movies, TV shows, and novels. Why, the doubters might ask, should we assume that that is just the stuff of fiction? We live in a world in which surprising numbers of people think that the moon landing was staged; and that is an event with no partisan or political valence. Why would Trump’s most fervent supporters (and there are millions and millions of them) believe that even the most innocent tragedy was truly innocent, no matter the evidence?
What is most interesting about this analysis is that it led me to conclude that there are no scenarios in which Trump could die that would not result in utter chaos. Indeed, even if Trump had announced at some point earlier this year that he had reconsidered and concluded that he did not want to be President again, the conspiracy theories would be flying, surely including suggestions that Trump had been threatened or, say, hypnotized by evildoers. Again, this and more can be found in the movies, including brainwashing.
It is thus impossible to picture a situation in which suspicions could be extinguished about anything that made Trump’s followers unhappy, even well short of his death. By contrast, when I spent part of my column last week working through the various bad health episodes that could befall Biden, the different scenarios at least could lead to different predictions about how the Democratic Party would respond. (Death or a coma would surely result in Biden’s being replaced as the party’s nominee. A recoverable “freezing event” might or might not.) Either way, however, anything that happens to Trump will lead many of his supporters to believe that “there are no coincidences.”
It is a tragedy that real human beings were killed and injured last Saturday. It is a tragedy that our political system was already infused with violence and the threat thereof, such that this most recent violent incident is different only in its particulars. And it is a tragedy that this will only serve to inflame the forces that have been making the U.S. system less and less stable, making ultimate agreement impossible to imagine.
Again, I am not making any assertions in this column regarding the motives, facts, or theories surrounding this past weekend’s shooting at the Trump rally, which I plan to analyze in my next column. I am simply noting that what is being perceived as political violence might not even be political at all, but because we know that this is the kind of incident that will prove to be all too useful for political purposes, no amount of evidence or logic will definitively answer that basic question. And now that even that threshold matter is immune to rational discussion, what could possibly calm the waters? Tragedy upon tragedy.