An assassination attempt on democracy

Donald Trump has survived an assassination attempt. The shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania yesterday – in which a Trump supporter was killed, as was the suspected shooter – will become the defining moment of this presidential election campaign, and one of the defining moments of this still-young century; sealed by the striking, cinematic moment when Trump, his face bloodied, raised a defiant fist, shouting ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ to a relieved, cheering crowd, before being ushered offstage and to safety. Had the bullet that reportedly pierced the upper part of his right ear been a few millimetres closer to his skull, we’d be picking through the rubble of a world-historical event today, and America would be teetering on the brink. Thankfully, Trump says he is ‘fine’, is out of the hospital and will press ahead with campaigning.

What has emerged about the shooting already points to a catastrophic failure on the part of the US Secret Service. A 20-year-old man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, has been named as the suspect. He appears to have taken aim from a rooftop, just outside the security perimeter – the sort of spot that should have had armed agents planted firmly on top of it. An eyewitness has told the BBC that he and his friends spotted the shooter crawling up to his vantage point and immediately tried to alert the authorities, to no avail. Even after Trump was hit, his minders appeared slow to bundle him off the stage.

Last night sorted the liberals and leftists completely lost to Trump Derangement Syndrome from those still in possession of some common sense and basic decency. ‘Make America aim again’, chortled journalists in since-deleted tweets, while ‘Staged’ started trending. Once again, the ‘sensibles’ have shown they are as given to harebrained conspiracy theories as your average QAnon nut. (Inevitably, the conspiratorial right is already mouthing the words ‘inside job’.) Meanwhile, Joe Biden offered a welcome – if tepid – condemnation, while newspapers sputtered, at first, to call this what it was: an assassination attempt, not ‘loud bangs’, ‘popping noises’, or a ‘fall’, as was originally reported.

Perhaps this was just extreme circumspection, though I doubt they’d write the same headlines if what sounded like gunshots had just sent Biden to the floor. Perhaps it just took a moment for the full enormity of what was happening to dawn on the mainstream media. Indeed, for all their talk of Trump or Russian bots posing an ‘existential threat’ to American democracy, this is what anti-democracy at its most bloody looks like: a candidate almost being removed from the ballot by a bullet. It is precisely this kind of political barbarism that a democratic republic, blessed with freedom of speech and mutual toleration, is meant to overcome.

At time of writing, we know very little about the suspected gunman. The Washington Post says that he was a registered Republican. While that isn’t the ‘case closed’ detail liberals are already claiming it is, it is a reminder that hasty dot-connecting is usually a recipe for misinformation and unedifying point-scoring at times like this. Those currently suggesting Joe Biden all but called the hit on Trump, because he recently told donors ‘it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye’, are no better than the Dems who hysterically suggest Trump’s feisty speeches are incitements to violence. Nor should this moment be used as a pretext to shame and silence those who quite reasonably condemned Trump’s anti-democratic response to losing the 2020 election. The freedom to think and speak, the ability to change your government through the ballot box rather than the gun – these are the ways you hold society together, not the suppression of speech and political contestation.

Even more despicable have been those who have all but blamed Trump for his attempted assassination. ‘Nothing justifies an assassination bid – but did Trump play [a] part in changing the rules of engagement?’, read a Sky News headline last night, since rewritten. Former BBC North America editor Jon Sopel even chided Trump for shouting ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ from the podium. It was ‘depressing’, he said. More so than the shooting, Jon? The victim-blaming of shot-at populists is becoming an alarming trend. In May, following the gunning down of Slovakian PM Robert Fico, a Sky News pundit said it was ‘not surprising that this sort of event might take place’, given how ‘divisive’ Fico has been in Slovakia and the EU of late.

No one is responsible for Trump’s shooting other than the shooter himself. It doesn’t matter what YouTubers or cable-news hosts or tweeters he happens to have liked. Whether the gunman turns out to be a Never Trumper or closet Antifa or a random nutcase, this is on him. At the same time, it does free-speechers no favours to pretend that words and rhetoric and the political climate are not really a thing. While we wait to learn more about the motive, it is hardly outrageous or authoritarian to suggest that the routine demonisation of Trump as not simply wrongheaded or authoritarian, but ‘literally Hitler’ – a slur reprised by last month’s New Republic cover, which featured a square-tashed Trump and the words ‘American fascism’ – might hold some sway out there among elements of society. To suggest that Trump would be at precisely the same peril if Democrats had spent the past nine years calling him ‘literally Gandhi’ is absurd. It’s legitimate to call it out.

Because this is the thing about the ‘Nazi’ slur. It is meant to dehumanise, to justify your snuffing out by any means necessary. Just ask the Ukrainians, whose brutalisation by Russia has been justified on the lurid, ridiculous grounds that Zelensky leads a fascistic, blood-thirsty regime. Or even the gender-critical feminists, who have been punched and kicked by balaclava-clad men, because to be in favour of women-only spaces today is to be a crypto-fascist, apparently. You do not have to be a pearl-clutching Trumpist to suspect that Trump constantly being conjured up as a Nazi-level threat to human civilisation might make some violent and deranged people feel justified in having a pop at him.

Words have power. Which is precisely why freedom of speech must never be infringed upon. Which is why the American First Amendment prevents even the advocacy of violence, provided it is not likely and intended to spark imminent lawlessness, from being censored by the state. Because to silence speech is always an evil, regardless of how extreme or dangerous or evil we might find the speech to be. Censorship eats away at our right to think and speak freely, all while robbing us of our agency. It suggests we must be shielded from certain ideas, otherwise we’ll mindlessly act on them – that your average Trumpist will hear ‘Stop the Steal’ and go and gun down Mike Pence; or your average MSNBC viewer is only ever one ‘Trump is Hitler’ monologue away from downloading ‘HowToBuildAPipeBomb.pdf’.

Whatever the motive, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was an assassination attempt on democracy – on the freedoms people hold dear the world over. Let’s not let this be used to chill those freedoms. Let’s use them to argue about what the hell has gone wrong, and to oppose the poisonous hysteria that has gripped sections of American life – from the conspiratorial fringe to the anti-populist ‘centre’.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_