https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/we-need-to-talk-about-the-violent-hatred-for-donald-trump/
The BBC says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. It’s half right. There does seem to be a ‘new normal’ over there, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.
There’s a palpable reluctance in the MSM today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonise over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in yesterday’s fracas was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarisation’. The Beeb says it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.
Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the US. Even supporters of the Second Amendment feel iffy that fruitloops can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and rock up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarisation’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarisation) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.