First and (Probably) Last Musings on the Trump Shooting
The fatal shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania — the state to which Barack Obama was referring when he spoke of the uneducated underclass “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” interestingly — is the kind of moment in American politics that tends to crystallize divisions, blur rational judgment, and send the media (all forms) into seizures of exploitation mania. I happened to be working on my computer early Sunday morning here in Korea, the time of the Saturday evening rally in Pennsylvania, when the news broke, and the first video appeared, so I too was swept up in the immediate sense of “This changes everything” that tends to dominate such events, partly due to the breathless and manipulative excitement of those on whom we necessarily rely to inform us of the events. Sadly, or happily — depending on one’s assessment of “everything” — nothing these days ever really changes everything, or even very much of anything.
Twenty-four hours later, as I write this, the dust has settled, the self-contradictory conspiracy theories have been drawn up on all sides, and the politicos have elbowed their respective ways into position to gain their perceived personal advantages out of this sad story. The rest of us, therefore, can all take a breath and look at the situation more objectively. Well, we can all do that, but of course most people will do no such thing. I, on the other hand, not being an American and feeling no stake whatsoever in the outcome of any election taking place anywhere on Earth this year — I have been observing publicly, for almost twelve years now, that the time for any serious electoral “stakes” talk has passed — am happy to take a few minutes to catalogue my reactions to the shooting and its aftermath, if only so that I may close the book on this little episode and get on with the business of attending to the proper needs of the soul.
Before this shooting, Donald Trump appeared to have finally found — third time’s a charm — the one Democratic opponent against whom he stood a solid chance of actually winning the popular vote, namely nobody, aka Her Dummy Royal Highness Joe Biden. (That’s a Monty Python reference, in case you are a philistine.) After the shooting, that still appears to be the case, which is to say nothing has changed.
The one undeniable element of genius in Donald Trump — which, like most instances in life that can properly be described as genius, has much in common with idiot savantism — is his preternatural instinct for reading a moment, and a crowd, with a view to presenting himself in the best light for attracting the many to his image, which is to say to the public persona he is always seeking to project. As we all saw in the video from the shooting, Trump somehow found the presence of mind (if that is the right term for such an instinct), one minute after dropping to the stage floor and being swarmed by secret service agents shielding him from potential harm, and while still visibly shaken, with blood streaked across his face, to shout at the agents seeking to whisk him off the stage to “Wait! Wait!” so that he could have time to shake a defiant fist to his supporters while repeatedly mouthing the word “Fight!” to which his people erupted, in an almost Dionysian ecstasy, with chants of “USA! USA!” The reflex of the born showman and reality TV huckster controls Trump’s mind even in the rawest moment of alarm and legitimate concern. That is impressive in its way — “its way,” however, being the way of the dyed-in-the-wool vainglorious crowd-pleaser and demagogue. “This is going to kill in the ratings!”
The ease with which his actions seem to have swept much of his country into waves of admiration is an excellent measure of Trump’s continuing strength as a popular entertainer, as well as of the extent to which modern America (and no, she is certainly not alone in this) has lost her moorings in common sense or rational perspective. For what exactly was Trump implying by his brilliant response to this moment, his “Fight! Fight!” fist-pumping rabble-rousing display? Fight what?
The answer, of course — and it is only natural that Trump, who has fostered this sensibility in himself and his supporters for years now, would instinctively seize on and project this message under duress — is: Fight Them. Don’t let Them do this to me/us. Don’t let Them steal your country by stealing your leader from you. They mustn’t be allowed to win, i.e., to stop me as They hope to do, because They know that I and I alone am the only force that can stand up to Them and lead you, my people, to greatness. In other words, his instinct was to play on the notion that this shooting was, and had to be, something somehow attributable to Them, all of Them, the enemy, the entire political establishment that dares to resist Donald Trump. This, I’m sorry to say yet again, was the cult leader taking advantage of yet another opportunity, the greatest one ever, to tighten his grip on the psyche of his cult.
Sure enough, as though right on cue, even Elon Musk chose to leap onto his own social media platform, X, to affirm (as though it were in doubt) his endorsement of Donald Trump for president, as if to say, “We mustn’t let Them do this to our country and our leader! We must all rally behind Trump right now and defeat Them before they stop him.” But wait. Who are They? How are They, collectively and ideologically, identifiable with the attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Pennsylvania? And perhaps most importantly, what exactly are you expecting Trump to do that is so vital that he must be supported at all costs, and at this moment above all?
There is no one in the world today who is more elated, nor more justifiably elated, by the events of the past twenty-four hours, than Vladimir Putin. This is not a commentary, but a simple statement of the obvious. The populist alliance of international apologists for, and admirers of, the Putin tyranny has been given a much-needed shot in the arm in recent weeks: Le Pen gaining ground in France, Farage resurgent in Britain, and now, most importantly of all, the near-certainty that as of November 2024 United States foreign policy will be securely back on the trajectory of predictable appeasement for Russian aggression, replete with blame-the-victim rationalizations against Ukraine, Europe, and NATO.
It is highly noteworthy, à propos of what I have said above, that the day after the shooting Trump has issued a public statement on the events, in which he uses this strange phraseology to describe an attempt on his own life: “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” The “unthinkable” here, not to put too fine a point on it, means nothing other than his own death. One attendee at the rally actually died from one of the bullets fired, while other people were injured. This loss of life, and injury, deserves Trump’s “condolences” and “wishes,” to be sure; but at least, as he reassures his followers, “the unthinkable” did not happen.
Luckily for Trump, his bizarre callousness about the lives and worth of the little people (i.e., his voters), and his matter-of-fact assertion that all is well and the Lord is watching over America because he was not seriously hurt, will only garner nods of solemn approval from the faithful, who will agree with him that an innocent bystander’s murder is a small price for God to pay to protect the MAGA savior. During his 2016 campaign, Trump famously said that his supporters would not leave him if he shot a man on Fifth Avenue. I suppose his blithe third-person-style account of his good fortune, depicting it as God having “prevented the unthinkable,” even while an innocent Trump supporter lies dead by gunfire, is yet another clear and remarkable proof that he was absolutely right about his followers.
And since Trump always gets most of his own talking points from his media supporters, it should not be surprising that he is conveniently turning the shooting, and specifically his own survival, into a religious event of near-biblical proportions. After all, I heard the ranting fool Vivek Ramaswamy on Fox News hours after after the shooting, apparently still throwing Hail Mary passes for a last-minute vice-presidential nomination, quite literally describing the event in exactly these Trump-is-God’s-chosen-one terms.
“God intervened today, not just on behalf of President Trump but on behalf of our country,” Ramaswamy says, and undoubtedly millions of Trump supporters wholeheartedly agree. What kind of religious belief do such comments indicate? This is not to say that God did not intervene — for a truly religious person it might be reasonable to regard all of life as a series of divine interventions, so to speak — but rather to cast doubt on the convenient certainties of all those who ascribe specific motives to God based on this or that immediate outcome which happens to match their wishes.
This, we may suppose, is why the notion of divine intervention tends to be reserved for just such moments. Very few religious people, at least in this age of weak and self-serving faith, have the courage to accept that the outcomes they abhor are just as likely to have been divinely chosen as the outcomes they happen to feel good about at the moment. Of course, it must always be remembered, by those of us on the outside of God’s will looking in, that, as the old saw has it, the Lord works in mysterious ways, which is to say that the apparent meaning of an act of God rarely turns out to be the true or ultimate meaning. In short, the proof is in the pudding, and we humans rarely if ever get a glimpse, let alone a spoonful, of the divine pudding, least of all in the heat of the moment.
