A Day for Choosing

Trump's near-assassination revealed America at her worst, and her best

In mid-March, 1981, Ronald Reagan was at a ceremony in Ford’s Theatre, contemplating the flag-draped theater box where Lincoln was murdered. Funny, he thought, how even with all the state-of-the-art security a president could now boast, he could still be shot by someone who really wanted to get him.

Two weeks later, he was coughing up blood in a hospital bed, the doctors scrambling to find an entry wound. They finally found it under his arm—a neat, bloodless little slice. If things had gone as planned, the devastator bullet would have exploded on entry. But it needed a long-barrel gun, like a rifle, and all John Hinckley had was a short-barrel. So instead, the bullet had torn through the armpit, through the lung, then stopped, unexploded, one inch from the president’s heart.

Last Saturday, the shooter did have a rifle. Analysts have argued furiously over just how he was able to climb on a roof with it and take a clear shot at President Trump, whether the Secret Service failed, and on and on. There’ll be much more analysis to come. For now, we consider what could have been, then shudder and look away, because it’s too nightmarish to think about. And for one innocent family, the nightmare is already here.

We are not the country we were in 1981. We are a country where, as soon as the shots rang out, bystanders were turning on members of the press, shouting “You did this! You, and you, and you! This is your fault!”

In one sense, they were wrong. In another sense, their anger was understandable. For years, the left has been given a pass to indulge in the worst kind of “assassination porn” around Donald Trump. Victor Davis Hanson counts just a few of the ways various famous people have fantasized about killing him: “By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam),” and on and on the list goes, including the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson in 2015, saying “someone needs to put a bullet in Trump.” (Of course the official Lincoln Project Twitter has put out something banal about how “political violence has no place in American life,” but Pepperidge Farm remembers, and so does the Internet.)

These fantasies have been accompanied by a steady drumbeat to the effect that Trump is literally Hitler, that his supporters are literally Nazis, and that Trump’s candidacy is a Threat to Democracy Itself. At the Washington Post last Christmas, you had the man who coined Godwin’s Law writing that “We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.”

In a world where Nazis have replaced the demons and Hitler has replaced Satan, the left does not have the “luxury” of making such comparisons, only to be outraged when someone points out it’s a small step from such rhetoric to lethal violence. In The Atlantic the day after, austere American columnist David Frum shamelessly goes right on making them, while expecting us to take him seriously when he describes the attempt as “a horror and an outrage.” He expects us to take him seriously even as he continues to smear Trump’s supporters as blind, stupid, and prejudiced, with not one dignified word to spare for Corey Comperatore, the retired fire chief who took a bullet to the brain while shielding his wife and daughters. Not a word for the ER doctor who was seen covered in blood after trying to save Corey, or the other ordinary bystanders who jumped into action to carry the body away and assist two other injured victims. “Deplorables,” one and all.

As I fumed about the article on Twitter, several readers said they couldn’t even read it, because they’d never bothered to subscribe. No wonder.

We are not the country we were in 1981, where within a minute the AP’s on-scene reporter Mike Putzel had rushed to a payphone and dictated a Bulletin that “Several gunshots were fired at President Reagan.” At home, his wife and children were watching Sesame Street on PBS, which interrupted the program as soon as the news came in to give live updates.

Last Saturday, by contrast, the AP’s first headline informed everyone that Donald Trump was “whisked off stage after loud noises rang through the crowd.” Other headlines helpfully clarified: “Trump rushed off stage by Secret Service after loud popping noises heard” (MSNBC), or just “Trump rushed offstage after loud noises heard” (WaPo), and my favorite, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally” (CNN—scroll down in this archived page from the Wayback Machine). The jokes wrote themselves: “Archduke Ferdinand Reclines Quickly.” “Caesar Injured in Group Hug.” “Lincoln Nods Off at Play.”

The charitable take here is that journalists are limited in how specific they can be immediately after this sort of “incident” (though this didn’t seem to stop Mike Putzel in 1981). But even given more time, Newsweek still chose to go with “MAGA responds with outrage after Donald Trump injured at Pennsylvania rally.” Even Trump’s own defiant reaction was repeatedly spun as a troubling failure to “lower the temperature” of the discourse, rather than what it plainly was—an intuitive masterstroke of genuine political leadership. Tyler Austin Harper was one of the rare mainstream writers to recognize this, writing of Evan Vucci’s instantly iconic photograph that “Yesterday, for a few moments at least, the Trump of MAGA’s imagination and reality became indistinguishable.”

Meanwhile, according to reports from DC to Times Square, it took over an hour for TV screens to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming. By then, everyone had seen the footage multiple times with their own eyes.

It seems fair to say that no event in American history has provided a starker contrast between old and new media. It’s never been clearer that Twitter is the new public square. It provided concrete updates in real time, from multiple angles of the shooting to on-the-ground interviews to first eyewitness reports in independent outlets like The Free Press. Not only could you see Vucci’s history-making shot, you could see footage of him rushing to take it, as well as footage of the same moment from his own point of view. (Vucci himself is a member of the mainstream press, providing a reminder that true journalists do still walk among us.)

Yet, as ever, the Internet was a double-edged sword. As popular Twitter anon Good Tweetman noted glumly, “The Internet easily makes every historic event at least 20x more stupid.” One rando thought it would be funny to post selfies and video of himself pretending to be the shooter, only to realize with horror that someone had sent them viral as if they were real news. A fellow rando crowed, “bro memed too close to the sun.”

Even worse, deranged leftists of various stripes took turns digging up Corey Comperatore’s old tweets and gloating over his death. Nothing drove home the unique stupidity of our present moment more clearly for me than this disgusting spectacle: a beloved man murdered, a husband, father and hero, and before his body is in the grave, every random intemperate political thought he’s ever expressed in public is being pawed over by ghoulish strangers. A whole lifetime, a whole man, reduced to this tweet about Vladimir Putin, or that tweet about the Gaza War. This is something that was literally not possible in 1981. This is the genie we will never put back in the bottle, the curse that will always accompany the blessing.

But social media can’t be the scapegoat for a much deeper sickness in the body politic. As I write this on Monday morning, I read that MSNBC has pulled Morning Joe off air for fear that someone might make an “inappropriate” remark and torpedo the network. Nobody needed to do this when Reagan was shot. On the operating table, he joked that he hoped the medical team were Republicans, whereupon the head doctor famously replied, “Mr. President, today we are all Republicans.” On a Twitter Space, someone old enough to recall the day remembered how even if you didn’t like Reagan (and he certainly had his haters), you kept it to yourself. The doctor’s words weren’t just a throwaway line. They reflected something true, something we’ve lost.

Today, among the rote platitudes from various Democrats, the one really substantial act of political leadership that stands out is Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s heartfelt eulogy for Corey Comperatore. Granted, he was calling Trump supporters “profoundly and pathetically weak” not long ago. We can hope this weekend has given him an opportunity for reflection and maturation. He appears to be the best Democrats have to offer.

In a new Washington Examiner interview, Trump has for his part announced a major tone shift for the forthcoming convention. Rather than delivering the “humdinger” speech he would have given (and of course he wants to make sure we know it would have been terrific, really incredible), he’s tearing it up and planning to make a pitch for “unity.” This is a politically smart move. At the same time, I doubt “national unity” is possible on any significant scale. As Trump himself wonders aloud in the interview, how exactly does one unite voters who think men can be women with voters who don’t? The answer is that you can’t, not really.

Fortunately for Trump, it looks like he probably won’t have to. Even if the Democrats weren’t already scrambling to assemble the post-Obama coalition that never gelled, and even if their candidate wasn’t a dementia patient, nobody could have scripted a better campaign ad than this. It’s easy for policy wonks to forget that lots of American voters don’t make voting decisions based on a careful weighing of candidates and Issues. They vote with their gut, and they vote for who they like. And it’s just impossible not to like a guy who dodges a bullet and gets back up with his fist in the air. (There’s a whole spicy discourse to be had about the extent to which this may peel off some of the black vote, which I don’t intend to start now, but I’ll just… leave this here, with a strong language warning.)

That still doesn’t change the fact that Americans do not broadly share the same sociopolitical core, and haven’t for some time. Though some have tried to draw comparisons to 1968, the tumultuous year Bobby Kennedy and MLK Jr. were assassinated. But as Nate Hochman notes, even then mainstream Democrats actively sought to quash the radical left fringe. Today, the radical is the mainstream.

We’ve also lost something else: a shared religion. Witness the very fact that MLK, Jr. could make an explicitly Christian appeal to the American public, in sharp contrast with the aggressive secularism of Black Lives Matter.

Even in 1981, religion could be a binding agent. This was movingly represented in the lifelong friendship between Reagan and his Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. When Reagan was in the hospital, O’Neill was one of the first visitors allowed into his room. The men embraced tenderly, and O’Neill proceeded to pray the 23rd Psalm. It’s impossible to picture such a scene unfolding today. How many of our politicians, on either side of the aisle, could even quote Psalm 23 from memory?

In his diary, Reagan writes that he was moved to pray even for the “mixed-up young man” who had shot him. Today, our “mixed-up young men” are more numerous and more lost—addling their brains with instant porn, tumbling down ever more bizarre Internet rabbit holes, losing the ordinary incarnated means by which young men used to connect with each other. At 20, Trump’s shooter was young enough to have had his high school education disrupted mid-course by the pandemic. A classmate recalled that he kept wearing masks even when it was no longer required.

I mention these things not to excuse the shooter or impose facile explanations onto his actions, but to point out that politics can’t bear the whole explanatory weight for black swan events like this. In fact, politics may not even explain the events themselves at all, for all that political reactions can reveal character. Someone on Twitter posted a collage of late-night leftist comedians, asking rhetorically, “Do you think they feel responsible?” But what 20-year-old is watching Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert on YouTube? For that matter, what 20-year-old is reading the Washington Post or The Atlantic?

Speculation about the shooter’s motives will naturally continue until more information comes to light. Some find it suspicious that he appears to have no digital footprint—no Reddit screeds, no Discord chats, no 4chan memes. All we really know is that he was a lonely, dweeby kid who worked at a nursing home, loved history and government classes, and never gave any of his friends a reason to think he’d do something insane like this. If anything, someone remembers he liked to stand all alone in the “conservative” corner when class took political sides. This, of course, will be milked to maximum effect, as will the fact that he was a registered Republican. Then again, he gave $15 to a Democratic PAC. So round and round and back and forth we go, trying to guess what this all Means, flipping through the few pictures floating around. Everyone’s talking about the fact that he died wearing a T-shirt for a gun channel. But the T-shirt I can’t get out of my head is the one he wears in a much younger picture. It has an American flag on it, and over the flag, Mt. Rushmore.

Perhaps this is all an elaborate coverup. But perhaps we’re not finding a footprint because he never had one. Perhaps we’re not finding a manifesto because he was never coherent enough to write one. Perhaps all any of this really Means is that sometimes, lonely weird young men will do anything to feel something.

There was more than one iconic photo to come out of the day. Vucci’s is the one that will be most remembered, but there’s also the image I chose for my preview, captured by Doug Mills, which literally captures the bullet streak behind Trump’s head.

Some say he’s the luckiest bastard in the world. Some say he was protected by the hand of God. By now we’ve all seen the diagrams showing how if he had tilted his head just an inch the other way, it would have been over. Already, people are circulating a three-month-old “prophecy” from an earnest gentleman who predicted Trump would nearly be shot dead, but the bullet would just graze his right ear, and he would go on to win the election.

I don’t put much stock in prophecies, myself. But I do believe in divine providence, though in what sense I couldn’t really tell you. In times like these, I confess I still struggle to see precisely where chance ends and providence begins, particularly when one man appears randomly alive and another man appears randomly dead.

The day after the shooting, I was on the highway when a car abruptly changed lanes across me, heading for the shoulder. I hit the brakes, and I was just lucky that I hit them in time, and that no one was right behind me. Or maybe I wasn’t just lucky. I don’t really know. I don’t really think I can.

Still, without thinking about it, I say, “Thank God.”