RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine being taken off the airwaves because your bosses are worried you might gloat over an attempted murder. That, reportedly, has been the fate of pundits on MSNBC’s maddeningly woke talk show, Morning Joe. It’s been pulled from the air today, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, allegedly out of fear that a guest might make an ‘inappropriate’ comment about the shooting. CNN has the lowdown. It reports that MSNBC benched its best-known show, despite the ‘seismic’ events of the past 48 hours, as a pre-emptive strike against the possibility that one of the ‘stable of two-dozen-plus guests’ would say something nuts about the violence visited on Trump.

If this is true – and we have no reason to doubt that it is, given the liberal media’s been full of ‘inappropriate’ chatter on the shooting of Trump – it is terrifyingly revealing. That one of America’s top liberal broadcasters seemingly cannot trust its own talking heads to be sombre and decent in the aftermath of the attempted slaying of a former president is extraordinary. It points to more than the problem of shock-jockery, where people who say outrageous things tend to get the most clicks and clout. It speaks to something worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome. No, it shines a light on the wholesale unanchoring of the woke elites from the norms of democratic politics, and their drift into an alternative world of invective and vengeance.

I don’t know about you, but if I was prevented from doing my job for a day allegedly out of concern that I might downplay, mock or outright justify the attempted killing of a human being, I would engage in some serious self-reflection. If MSNBC bigwigs really did get the jitters over Morning Joe, we know very well what kind of ‘inappropriate’ commentary they feared. They’d have fretted that someone might say ‘Trump fed the violence that has been turned on him’. Or that the real problem post-shooting is Trump’s ‘fanatical devotees’ who will now be more convinced than ever of his ‘messianic appeal’. Or that Trump’s survival of a shooting might sadly boost ‘his appeal to black voters’. Or that ‘nothing justifies an assassination bid, but’ – but! – ‘did Trump play [a] part in changing the rules of engagement?’. They might have feared their liberal windbags saying things like this because liberal windbags elsewhere have said exactly these things.

The liberal media’s coverage of the attempted murder of a politician has been chilling. There were the crazy immediate headlines. Like CNN saying, ‘Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally’. What made him fall? A gust of wind? Perhaps it was a ‘mostly peaceful assassination attempt’, as every wise guy on X has said. ‘Trump has been escorted off the stage during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd’, said the Associated Press. Was it fireworks, perhaps? An annoying ringtone? I appreciate that breaking-news outlets must get stuff out fast, but images of Trump’s bloodied face were already circulating when these people were yapping about a ‘fall’ and ‘noises’. Could they not even bring themselves to say ‘possible shooting’?

Then there was the handwringing over the electoral boost Trump might enjoy on the back of being shot. Forbes rushed out one of the maddest columns I’ve ever read. ‘Will surviving gunfire be Donald Trump’s next appeal to black voters?’, it asked. It was by Shaun Harper, a ‘scholar on diversity, equity and inclusion’. It fretted that ‘being shot’ might improve Trump’s standing among African-Americans, given this is ‘an experience that far too many (not all) black people have [had]’. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the borderline racist implication that black Americans will think ‘He’s been shot, like I was!’ and rush out to vote for him, or the focus less on the evil of political violence than on its alleged benefits. If your response to an attempted murder is ‘Damn, the victim is going to milk this’, it’s possible you’ve lost the moral plot.

David Frum panicked in the Atlantic that Trump will ‘exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality’ for electoral gain. The Irish Times issued a perfunctory denunciation of the attempted slaying of Trump – it was ‘foolish and wrong’: good to know – but then said: ‘Watch as he exploits it.’ ‘This event’, it said, ‘may well help the former president win the White House in November’. I feel that sometimes we read commentary like this without appreciating the coldness of it, the post-morality of it. Plainly put: if your chief concern following the attempted murder of a presidential candidate that tens of millions of people are itching to vote for is to think, ‘Oh no, this might help him’, rather than, ‘Oh no, this is an atrocity against democracy’, you clearly have allowed your dread of Trump to shatter your moral compass.

Worst of all, there was the liberal media’s implication, and at times outright insistence, that Trump brought his attempted murder on himself. ‘Trump fed the violence that has been turned on him’, said the Irish Times. ‘One can condemn political violence’, it said, ‘and still seek its underlying causes’. Imagine if someone said that after the killing of JFK. Or the murder of Jo Cox. That Ireland’s newspaper of record seems to think there can be ‘underlying causes’ to a wicked man’s violent assault not only on an individual, but also on the democratic process itself is a testament to how sickened by Trump Derangement Syndrome the Western bourgeoisie has become.

‘Nothing justifies an assassination bid – but did Trump play [a] part in changing the rules of engagement?’ That question was asked by Sky News. That ‘but’ could be Exhibit A in a future trial of the madness of the media elites. Trump has become ‘a victim of the very violence he has done so much to validate’, argues Fintan O’Toole. And now his ‘fanatical devotees’ will be further convinced of his ‘messianic appeal’. One wonders what is going through the minds of the haughty scribes of the establishment press that they can mock Trump’s ‘devotees’ just days after one of them was killed and two of them critically injured by a wicked, reckless killer.

For me, nothing better captures the irreversible rupture between the media and basic morality than Frum’s likening of Trump to the man who tried to kill him. The ‘gunman and Trump’, he wrote, ‘at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy’. This is beyond the Pale. To speak of a killer and his target in the same breath, to compare an assassin with his quarry, to fail to see the chasm-sized difference between a man who sought to slay an electoral candidate and a man standing for election… This is more than hyperbole, more than provocation. It is a moral inversion of Orwellian proportions, where night becomes day, black becomes white, and a shooter is the same as the man he shot.

The fallout from the shooting of Trump has given us a grim insight into the moral decay of our cultural rulers. From their low-key gloating over the attempted assassination of Trump to their fretting that it will help to spirit him back into the White House, they continually elevate their own narrow factional fears over the moral clarity this moment cries out for. My question is this: if they can be so cavalier towards this act of violence, what other atrocities might they feel relaxed about? What other terror might they excuse, apologise for, claim has ‘underlying causes’? What level of murder might they be willing to tolerate to restore what they view as their rightful rule? In failing to condemn, clearly, this act of savagery, they’ve sent a signal that sometimes savagery is acceptable. It isn’t only Trump who needs to worry that so many in our cultural elite seem so blasé about brutality.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy