The Myth of "Lowering the Temperature" of Western Politics
On July 13, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, the then-only-presumptive Republican nominee for president, a guy named Donald Trump who might be familiar to you if you follow the news closely, was shot in the ear by a kid who managed to sneak a gun onto the roof of a nearby building and decided, as so many do, that he wanted to commit suicide in a way that would get him into the history books.
My point today isn’t about what a big deal this is. My point is what a big deal this isn’t.
Forget all the conspiracy theories on either side of the aisle here. There was no hoax that would benefit either camp. The fact is that somebody—yes, a “lone wolf,”—managed to squeeze off a legitimate few shots, killing one bystander and actually drawing cranial blood from the high profile target, clipping his ear and giving the Trump team the best campaign photograph they could possibly have hoped for.
That was just over a month ago and nobody cares anymore. The conversation has moved on, but not to more serious things. On the contrary, the biggest stories in Trump world now mostly revolve around what a creepy little weirdo JD Vance is. Have you seen the one where he walks into a donut shop and tries to pretend he’s even seen a donut before?
The Trump campaign doesn’t even push those assassination photos anymore. They don’t generate the energy you would expect they should. Everyone has just moved on.
Can you imagine, though, if the assassin had succeeded?
Can anyone doubt that would have been one of the defining news stories of the century? Honest to God, I think the zeitgeist defining events of the 21st Century so far would have been that, and September 11. Put aside how you feel about the man, the consequences would have been all bad.
So how do we explain this? How can the history book zone lie only one inch from the who gives a shit zone when it comes to the trajectory of a whizzing bullet?
Turn the dial back to just over a decade ago. In January 2011, Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at close range in an assassination attempt at a public constituent meeting. Giffords, like Trump, survived the encounter, but the ripples were far more significant even though Giffords, a congresswoman, was far less politically consequential than a presidential nominee.
Her brush with death came at the tail end of a particularly nasty US midterms season, and it wasn’t long before attention was drawn to a campaign ad put out by Sarah Palin, Alaska Governor and holder of the title of least popular Vice Presidential candidate right up until… 2024’s JD Vance (and life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. –Stephen King)
Palin’s advertisement put Giffords (among other Democratic candidates) under a literal crosshairs, with the caption “We’ve diagnosed the problem, help us prescribe the solution.”
According to the Palin campaign these were actually mapmakers’ surveying symbols, and the idea that these were intended to look like gun sights was an absurd mischaracterisation. Clearly, Palin, who was known for her gun imagery and the heavily gun-themed nature of her campaigns, was simply trying to arouse the attention of the all-important professional cartographers’ demographic.
Nonetheless, the tragedy invoked calls to “turn down the temperature” of politics. The request was bipartisan—after all, playing the blame game here would be kind of counterproductive to the mission. It was like a scene from the schoolyard where a group of jocks keeps wailing on the math club kids until one of them gets seriously hurt, and the bullies pressure the nerds into telling the principal that they were all just horsing around. Things got too heated and golly it sure is a tragedy that someone got hurt this time, but it’s a great teaching moment for us to all step back and consider the consequences of all of our actions. There are very fine people on both sides of this… right?
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