RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

That there have been two suspected efforts to murder one of the candidates in the presidential election is extraordinary. It is unprecedented. ‘There’s no political playbook for how to deal with another apparent assassination attempt against a major-party presidential candidate within weeks of an election’, says Stephen Collinson at CNN. Platitudes about ‘gun culture’ and ‘culture wars’ are an outright betrayal of the gravity of the situation, of this unique, and uniquely unsettling, moment in the life of the American republic where a candidate for the highest office has come close to being murdered twice.

The second alleged attempt took place at Trump’s private golf club in West Palm Beach yesterday afternoon. Secret-service agents spied the barrel of a rifle poking through bushes around 300 to 500 yards from where Trump was golfing. They pursued the alleged would-be assassin and arrested him. It was one Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old from North Carolina with firm political beliefs, some of them quite eccentric. This follows the shooting of Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on 13 July. Trump’s ear was grazed. Had he not been turning his head at the time, he might be dead.

People are poring over Routh’s voting habits and social-media history in search of a motive. But he’s hard to pin down. He is super pro-Ukraine. He once said ‘we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground’. So perhaps he was aggrieved with Trump’s insistence that we need a compromise between Russia and Ukraine in order to bring that awful war to a close. He also seems Israelophobic. He questioned Jews’ claims to the land of Israel, sharing a map of the region with the words: ‘It seems to historically all be Palestinian.’ So maybe he hated Trump’s pro-Israel stance. It seems he was a Trump supporter once, but he later lost faith, damning Trump as an ‘idiot’, a ‘buffoon’, a ‘fool’ and a threat to democracy. ‘DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose’, he said in a post on X earlier this year in which he tagged Joe Biden.

Some Republicans and right-wing talking heads are citing all this stuff as proof that the Dems and their cheerleaders in the liberal media have whipped up a psychotic level of animus for Trump. After all, Routh’s outpourings sound familiar, right? ‘Democracy is on the ballot’ – say that at a New York Times soiree and 20 people will clink your glass in vivid agreement. I’m not comfortable with this argument. Even as someone concerned about the chattering classes’ Trump Derangement Syndrome, I find the drawing of a direct line between Dem rhetoric and a gunman’s violence cynical. And censorious. ‘Unless Kamala tones down her barbs, someone will get hurt’ – that’s the blackmailing undertone to this rush to pin the blame for violence on words.

It also feels too easy. Just as those who are fretting over gun culture and polarisation seem incapable of grappling with the seriousness of what’s happening, so those who say ‘IT’S ALL CNN’S FAULT’ clearly prefer pat explanations to deep interrogation. The idea that Kamala calling Trump a rude name might make a loon want to kill him is as mad as saying that owning an AK-47 is the logical first step to wanting to kill a presidential candidate. In both scenarios, too many steps are missed out. Too much nuance is discarded. Too much of the depth of the moral and political crisis afflicting the US – and much of the West – is sacrificed at the altar of scoring a quick point against your opponents on the back of horrific violence.

It strikes me that the boiling hatred for Trump, which has now expressed itself in two dreadful, almost murderous events, speaks to a culture whose roots are deeper than we know, and more difficult to discern than we would like. It’s a culture of simmering intolerance, a culture of grievance, a culture where one expresses one’s angst less through the old civilised norms of discussion and disagreement than through the wail of implacable rage and the instinct to destroy that which offends you. Is it possible the attempted assassinations of Trump are not really ideological acts, like the slaying of MLK or RFK, but rather are the militant wing of our amorphous cancel culture? An apocalyptic expression of something that is now almost mundane: high society’s burning hostility to that which deviates from the narrative of correct-think? Perhaps the unprecedented double attempt on the life of a presidential candidate feels both alien and familiar because it is shocking but also… not shocking. Right?

It’s possible, likely even, that media rhetoric contributed to this culture of grievance. But there is so much more at play. We are living through not only political hot-headedness but also a wholesale discarding of the old norms of democratic deliberation, of the civilised norms of argument and choice. In their stead has risen an intolerant lust for silencing rather than engaging with those who hold alternative visions for society. And Trump, for a myriad of reasons, has become the chief target of this uncivilised urge to crush the other. I wonder if the unwillingness of the intellectual classes to look honestly at the ‘new normal’ of anti-Trump violence springs from a fear that they might glimpse themselves in it – or at least glimpse their failure over the years to call out society’s drift from democracy to irrationalism. Regardless, we need to talk about the violent contempt for Trump, and what it tells us about our world.

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