Axios declared that Trump became president today. Again. He’s “pivoted” :
Former President Trump has something rare, precious and definitional: a moment — a fleeting chance to redefine himself, this election, America.
Why it matters: Almost dying rocks perspectives — and people. Yes, Trump has shown little appetite for changing his ways, tone and words. But his advisers tell us Trump plans to seize his moment by toning down his Trumpiness, and dialing up efforts to unite a tinder-box America, when the Republican convention opens Monday in Milwaukee.
“I think it’s real,” Tucker Carlson — who’ll speak in prime time at the convention, and talks to Trump often — told us. “Getting shot in the face changes a man.”
Trump — who landed yesterday in Milwaukee, just over 24 hours after the assassination attempt — brought a rare succinctness to a post on his Truth Social platform: “UNITE AMERICA!”
It’s an echo of former President Ronald Reagan, who projected strength and humor after being shot in 1981. The late David S. Broder, legendary Washington Post political dean, recalled decades later that Reagan “was politically untouchable from that point on. He became a mythic figure.”
Trump said in an interview Sundaywith the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, a Pittsburgh native who has long covered him, that he’s rewriting his Thursday convention speech to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together.
“The speech … was going to be a humdinger,” Trump told her as he boarded his plane in New Jersey. “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches,” aimed mostly at President Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
Zito writes that Trump repeatedly invoked God in their conversations. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” Trump told her. “I was given that chance.”
Uh huh.
Earlier today Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case . Yep, she did it. Here’s the Great Uniter’s response:
The good news is that this will break the short-lived truce that inexplicably forced the Democrats to become punching bags for the wingnuts to accuse them of inciting violence.
Fun fact: Cannon was appointed by Trump after the election when Mitch McConnell forced through a bunch of unqualified nominees to the federal bench, a very rare occurrence. It was especially hypocritical considering that he wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland to be confirmed more than 8 months before the election in 2016 saying that it wasn’t proper for an outgoing administration to fill such a seat until the people had spoken. (He did the same with Amy Coney Barrett.) The gravedigger of democracy just threw another pile of dirt on the coffin.
According to Brady United 327 people are killed with guns every day in the United States. Over one million have been shot in the last decade. There are more civilian owned firearms than there are people here. America is awash in gun violence and it’s so ubiquitous that we only raise our heads once in a great while when the body count is shockingly high or the victims are particularly vulnerable, like elementary school children. But this weekend we all looked up sharply when a lone sniper shot at Donald Trump and grazed his ear, killed a spectator and wounded two others.
These shootings are all horrific but this one was particularly shocking because America’s history of political assassinations is very long and we are living in one of our acute periods of political violence, whether from religious terrorism or unbalanced people who are radicalized on the internet. There have been attempted assassinations and violent threats against members of congress, the judiciary, the media and election officials in recent years and now the current Republican nominee for president, who also happens to be a former president as well. We are awash in political violence and the proliferation of guns has made it particularly deadly.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many people’s immediate assumption was that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Sunday was motivated by politics and/or ideology. While the vast majority of political violence of the past few years has been at the hands of jihadist radicals or right wing extremists there have been a few out of the left such as the man who shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise during a congressional baseball game. So it’s understandable that people would suspect the shooting could be motivated by hostility to Donald Trump.
Some of the rally-goers reportedly turned on the reporters covering the event, claiming they were responsible and had blood on their hands. Republican officials immediately accused President Biden and the Democrats of inciting the shooter with their campaign against Trump as a threat to democracy.
Some went even further:
The consensus formed very quickly that this wasn’t just an assassination attempt, it was the natural consequence of Democratic criticism of their political rival Donald Trump. This set off a flurry of more solemn remonstrations from other Republicans demanding that the Democrats “change the tone” of their campaign rhetoric. President Biden came out and very quickly condemned the attack which he repeated twice on Sunday. In his formal oval office address he said, “I want to speak to you about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics.” All the former presidents followed suit with similar statements as well, as did virtually every other elected Democrat.
But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.
[…]
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
Witness Speaker Mike Johnson unctuously declaring that Trump is “the most attacked persecuted president in history, maybe since Abraham Lincoln” and condemning the Democrats for saying the stakes in this election are anything unusual. When confronted with Donald Trump’s own rhetoric he just kept on going:
Anderson Cooper to Mike Johnson: "The former president himself has also used that kind of rhetoric. He said on June 27, 'Biden is a threat to democracy, a threat to the survival & existence of our country itself.' That's certainly the same kind of language you're talking about" pic.twitter.com/GBtuFiNm5l
Donald Trump is a demagogue and there is no one in political life who is more rhetorically violent than he is. With all the talk of lowering the temperature, nobody’s mentioned the fact that the most incendiary rhetoric about the event came from Donald Trump himself when he raised his fist and pumped it angrily yelling “fight” repeatedly to his crowd as he was led off the stage. I understand that he was probably in shock but that moment became instantly iconic and it was anything but calm and statesmanlike.
What did Trump mean by that? Was it just another opportunity to look tough, like his glowering expression in his mug shot? Was he hamming it up for the cameras? Or was he once again exhorting his followers to “fight” like they did on January 6th? With all the lugubrious handwringing over Biden and the Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy, nobody seems to care that his instinct in that horrible moment was to incite more violence.
The internet has been deluged with merchandise commemorating the moment already. Every person at the GOP convention this week will no doubt be wearing a t-shirt with the famous photo on it. Members of his faithful following are even getting tattoos of the image:
— मैं भारतवासी🇮🇳 (मोदी का परिवार) (@SachienTayal) July 15, 2024
Sunday’s event was the first such act of gun violence in many years that didn’t follow the usual ritual of initial horror and wall to wall coverage before we finally move on until the next one. This incident has inspired a totally different narrative. Nobody is talking about the fact that this was a 20 year old kid who got a hold of a semi-automatic weapon, apparently owned by his father. Nobody is saying this is a problem of mental health not easy access to guns. It’s all about politics and yet we have absolutely no evidence as of yet that this was a partisan political act at all.
Yes, shooting at a presidential candidate or a president is inherently “political” by definition. But this shooter was a registered Republican who liked guns so he hardly fits the profile of a left wing extremist inspired by Joe Biden’s stirring denunciations of Donald Trump. And not all assassination attempts are political anyway. Remember, Ronald Reagan was shot by someone who was trying to impress a movie star.
It’s certainly possible that we’ll find out that he was so upset by someone calling Donald Trump a fascist that he took action. It’s also possible that we’ll find out that he was just another unhappy, screwed up young man who decided that his life as he knew it wasn’t worth living and decided to go out in a blaze of glory. It literally happens in this country all the time and the great irony is that Donald Trump and his party have absolutely no answers for that problem at all. If that’s what this turns out to be I guess we’ll all just have to give them our thoughts and prayers and then move on. Isn’t that how it’s usually done?
“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell,” President Harry Truman once said. The Trumpist right is catching hell over the truth about Project 2025.
Roughly two hours after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blamed President Joe Biden.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance, the odds-on favorite to be Trump’s vice president, wrote on X formerly known as Twitter).
Vance was not alone. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote that “Democrats wanted this to happen.” Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said something similar. So did Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
All of this happened Saturday night, before we knew a single thing about the shooter’s identity or motive. Since then, the Secret Service has identified him as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, and we still don’t know much about his motive.
Bob Cesca reminded Twitter that before the press repeats claims from the MAGA right that the left’s calling out authoritarian plans developed and published by authoritarians as blameworthy somehow for the Trump assassination attempt, it should review the valorization of gun culture and violence on the right.
Zack Beauchamp contimues at Vox:
In libel law, truth is an absolute defense: you can’t be held legally responsible for damaging someone’s reputation if what you’re saying is actually true.
The same should hold true for Democrats’ rhetoric about Trump. Donald Trump really is a threat to democracy. He tried to overturn the 2020 election, incited a riot at the US Capitol, and is currently putting forward a 2025 policy agenda that could place dangerous amounts of power in his personal hands. Democrats not only should say that; they also have an obligation to voters to make it the centerpiece of their case.
In fact, it’s the parlous state of American democracy that makes the Republican response to Trump’s shooting so dangerous.
Trump dominates the Republican Party because a critical mass of the party’s base really, really hates Democrats. They believe that the Democratic Party is out to get them and destroy their way of life, and are willing to entrust power to a cruel demagogue in order to defeat the left. A small portion of this base believes this so deeply that they’re willing to commit actual violence in order to stop Democrats.
The press is already “both-sidesing” the response to the attempted assassination on Saturday evening. The New Satesman announces “The alarming rise of BlueAnon,” a left-wing counterpart to the QAnon movement. Liberals flooded the web with conspiracy theories about the shooting within minutes, announces the Washington Post, with speculation that the act was staged. (Yep, that occurred to me upon hearing the news too, but I wouldn’t blast the web with it.)
Suddenly, there’s BlueAnon? Among “major” leftist influencers? That’s news to me (Washington Post):
The shooting threw into overdrive a phenomenon dubbed “BlueAnon” — a play on the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon — that refers to liberal conspiracy theories online. As more Americans lose trust in mainstream institutions and turn to partisan commentators and influencers for information, experts say they are seeing a big uptick in the manufacture and spread of BlueAnon conspiracy theories, a sign that the communal warping of reality is spreading well beyond the right.
“The good-versus-evil paradigm of QAnon has really taken hold of the anti-Trump movement and you’re seeing two sides that feel like they are fighting a battle between good and evil,” said Mike Rothschild, author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.” “It’s coming from major leftist and liberal ‘resistance’ influencers who believe that Trump is so devious that he’d fake his own assassination attempt in order to help his campaign.”
NBC News also highlighted the phenomenon but with more emphasis on the fringe right response. Alex Jones blamed “the deep state.” Posts on X blaming a “prominent Antifa activist” spread with the help of “Russian propaganda accounts, MAGA and Proud Boy channels on Telegram.”
Let me add that I don’t know anyone associated with Antifa and I’m still waiting for my fat checks the fringe right insists people like me receive from George Soros.
Yes, this sort of thing always pops up, even on the left. To my recollection, however, no one on the left has carried an AR-15 into a pizza parlor to rescue innocents from a Satanic, child sex ring run by prominent politicians in a nonexistent basement. It’s primarily a right-wing phenomenon.
Conservatives are quick to decry the politicization of shootings while doing just that. But the press in this case has seized an opportunity to double down on both-sidesing to demonstrate its “balance.” Oh, Left is Left, and Right is Right, and never the twain shall meet. Until tragedy provides an opening for promoting false equivalence.
One of the great unintended consequences of the internet age is how it’s accelerated the spread of misinformation, disinformation and flat-out propaganda by both friends and enemies of western democracies. Those who wish to see democratic freedoms under the feet of authoritarians welcome and feed the spread of thinking that dissolves external reality. We are all infected. But it’s nothing new.
Early on September 11, 2001, a colleague’s wife called him at our construction trailer in northern New Hampshire and said a jet had crashed into one of the twin towers in New York. My first thought was it was an internet rumor. Not exactly.
Hoaxes and rumors had already impacted our culture and sold books and movies even before the internet acted like an accelerant for spreading them.
1) Thread. 🧵 If you're planning your next op/ed and you intend to scold both sides for violent rhetoric, think again and watch the following seven videos. Republicans have been producing violent ads targeting both legislation and actual Democrats for years. Let's review. pic.twitter.com/bTBMRhj31e
Yes, they aren’t explicitly killing their opponents. But I think we all understand what kind of cos play this really is.
We don’t know why this gun nut kid tried to kill Donald Trump yesterday. They literally can find nothing that explains his motive, at least so far. So he could just as easily be hearing voices or trying to impress Taylor Swift. We really have no clue. So all the remonstrating over the left allegedly violent tone is premature, at the very least. And if this was some kind of political act, let’s just say that kid who was obsessed with guns was likely more influenced by that garbage above than anything the “woke” trans hippies are doing.
The editor of the New Yorker wishes that someone would step forward and express the nation’s despair as eloquently as Robert F. Kennedy did after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I don’t know. After all, it was just a few months later that the assassin’s bullet found him. These threats are not quelled with poetic words and I don’t know if our society is even capable of hearing such things right now.
I think it’s more important not to forget what brought us here. As Remnick writes:
What must be said, contrary to the rhetoric of Vance, Scott, and Abbott, is that Trump has, to say the least, done little to calm or to unify the country he once led and is campaigning to lead again. Unfortunately, it is hard to recall a public voice in living memory who has done more to arouse the lowest passions that so often percolate within individuals and the greater society.
Even as one expresses genuine relief that Trump escaped a worse fate on Saturday (and sympathy for the family of the spectator at the rally who was killed), it is legitimate to describe what Trump and his rhetoric have meant to the country. ‘
He began his political career with statements like “When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto.” And he went on from there, year after year. After Obama attended a public viewing for Antonin Scalia, but not the funeral, Trump asked, “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque?”
With dizzying frequency, he trafficked in the demagogic language of dehumanization, of “scum” and “vermin” and “animals” and “enemies of the people.” And then there was “Lock her up!” and “Stand back and stand by.” In 2016, he deployed familiar bigoted tropes, declaring that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”
Over and over, he has glorified brutality, whether it was the desirability of police throwing “thugs” into “the back of a paddy wagon” or a congressional candidate body-slamming a reporter because he dared to ask about health-care policy. (“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my type,” Trump said.) When he heard that MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi had been hit by a rubber bullet during a demonstration in the wake of the death of George Floyd, he called it “a beautiful sight.”
Trump has always dismissed the idea that he has contributed to the division and inflammation of the country’s state of mind. When asked if his language was divisive, he replied, “I don’t think my rhetoric does at all. My rhetoric is very—it brings people together.” And yet he has not hesitated to mock his victims, even when their loved ones were victims of assault. Nancy Pelosi was “crazy,” he said. And when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was brutalized by a hammer-wielding attacker, he asked, sarcastically, “How’s her husband doing? Anybody know?” The Capitol Hill insurrection, which threatened the lives of Pelosi, Mike Pence, and other political leaders, found its inspiration in the rhetoric of one man.
It’s very rich of the Republicans to be lecturing Democrats about violent rhetoric. But of course they’re doing that. Shamelessness is their superpower. But the rest of us should not be cowed. Just tell the truth — as Remnick does above.
For many decades, Mar-a-Lago was just another venue for charity event, even under Trump’s ownership. Then he ran for president and the big grift was on. The New York Times took an in-depth look at how Trump bilks his followers, who happen to be far right extremists and GOP establishment exclusively. It’s a very thorough multi-media report, so I’ve attached a gift link for you to read the whole thing.
An excerpt:
Traditional charities began peeling away from the club in August 2017, after then-President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a violent rally to save a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Va. Of the groups that departed, 10 moved their events to Mar-a-Lago’s chief rival in the Palm Beach banquet business: The Breakers resort.
Groups aligned with Mr. Trump’s politics have taken their place.
Turning Point USA, a right-wing student organization, began hosting an annual gala at Mar-a-Lago in 2018. America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit set up in 2021 by former Trump administration officials, has thrown an “America First Gala” at Mar-a-Lago every year since its founding. America’s Future Inc. — a group led by Michael T. Flynn that has amplified the false conspiracy theory that a global cabal of pedophiles controls the media and politics — has held two events, as has Border911, founded by Thomas D. Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration.
“This is where we come to recharge our batteries and to know we will retake our nation,” Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide for Mr. Trump, said from the Mar-a-Lago stage in December. Mr. Gorka is the host of a radio show that describes itself as “the new front lines in the ongoing Culture War against the Left.”
The presidential race is not the only one rooted at Mar-a-Lago. A visit to the resort has become an essential rite for Republican candidates. Since 2021, more than 60 Republicans in or running for Congress or state office have spent money at Mar-a-Lago, most on fund-raisers. Their ultimate objective: securing an endorsement or a surprise appearance from Mr. Trump.
According to federal and state campaign finance filings through the first quarter of 2024, more than $4.7 million has been spent on the property by candidates and political committees since Mr. Trump left the White House and made Mar-a-Lago his permanent residence. Mr. Trump’s campaign, and super PACs supporting it, make up about a quarter of that total.
Trump’s grift is truly astonishing. Like all good con-men he knows his marks and he works them relentlessly. And like all cult leaders he’s convinced his ecstatic followers to believe every word he says.
That tracks with the congressman I wrote about yesterday who wants to go back to 1960. This isn’t Trump. After all, he has children with three different wives and was a playboy throughout his marriages. He assaults women and sleeps with porn stars.
But that doesn’t matter to these people. This is about patriarchy which seeks to control women. How many of these allegedly devout Christian pastors and cult leaders are pedophiles, rapists and philanderers? If Trump empowers them to turn back the clock to a time when men held all the cards and women were prisoners in their own homes and bodies, he can do whatever he wants.
David Corn takes a look at the right’s response to the shooting yesterday. Let’s just say they aren’t exactly being
It is hardly surprising that a political movement that has as its godhead a convicted felon and inveterate liar who attempted to overturn an election and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to retain power would within nanoseconds exploit the assassination attempt at a Donald Trump rally that left one attendee dead. But the utter brazenness of this effort has been stunning. Before crucial details were known—who’s the shooter? why did he do this?—MAGA was out in full-force to blame President Joe Biden, Democrats, and progressives for this shooting by stirring up anti-Trump sentiment. Leading the way in unhinged right-wing responses, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) called for Biden to be arrested for “inciting an assassination.”
Even after it emerged that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged shooter, was a registered Republican (who apparently made a $15 donation to a liberal political action committee in 2021), the crap kept coming. Sean Parnell, a right-wing commentator who in 2021 suspended his Senate campaign in Pennsylvania after his wife accused him of spousal and child abuse, tweeted at Biden: “It happened because of this sort of BS rhetoric from you & the rest of your party. It’s sickening. It needs to stop.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) quickly proclaimed that Biden “is responsible” for the shooting. She then went further than blaming the Ds for their anti-Trump rhetoric and retweeted a post from a MAGA activist who explicitly accused the Democrats of being behind the shooting: “The Dems realized it’s too late to switch out their candidate so they attempted to kill ours instead.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene voiced the same dastardly message: “Democrats wanted this to happen. They’ve wanted Trump gone for years and they’re prepared to do anything to make that happen.” Greene’s remark suggested the Democrats were somehow involved in this attempted assassination.
These comments from the Republicans and MAGA extremists were reckless and absurd. For years, Trump has been pushing an ugly narrative: Joe Biden and the Democrats are in league with antifa, Black radicals, and communists to destroy the nation. Trump has said this zillions of times. In both the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, he has exclaimed that if Biden is elected “we may not have a country anymore.” He has repeatedly preached an apocalyptic sermon casting his political rivals as bent on annihilating the United States. He has depicted Biden and his allies as an existential threat to America.
And, of course, Trump has repeatedly encouraged violence—most infamously on January 6. But with this shooting his MAGA allies quickly spotted an opportunity for a rubber-glue propaganda campaign to characterize the Dems as the true threat to democracy and civility and concoct a massive deflection. One of Biden’s chief lines of attack on Trump is that he presents a danger to the republic. Now the Trump crew had a chance to turn the tables and they eagerly grabbed it. Ultimately, the MAGA crowd doesn’t have to win the argument that Biden endangers democracy. They merely need to use it to muddy the waters and undercut the Democrats’ main case against Trump.
That’s the whole point. They shamelessly revert to the “I know you are but what am I” posture every time. Democrats shouldn’t fall for it.
Corn lists some of the other ridiculous right wing hot takes from big names like Elon Musk and Dave Rubin who said that Antifa should be named a terrorist organization without any proof that the shooter had an affiliation. Marco Rubio said that Go protected Trump (and apparently sacrificed a couple of bystanders, but whatevs.)
He concludes:
The attempted assassination of Trump was a horrific event that claimed the life of one person and further traumatized American politics. It also triggered a flood of bullshit. The MAGA world rushed to take advantage of the shooting to remake Trump, who has essentially condoned political violence by vowing to pardon January 6 rioters, into a martyr of political violence and to portray Democrats as the perpetrators of such violence. It is a foul act but a true reflection of the black-is-white reality-denialism of Trump and and his MAGA following
The cause of this tragic shooting has yet to be determined. But one thing is certain: Only one of the candidates in the 2024 contest incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to overturn an election and still threatens American democracy. What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, does not change that.
I agree with that. And this, which is also all over social media.
He did ham it up. And for all the pearl clutching on the right admonishing the left for its allegedly incendiary rhetoric, you’d think that Trump’s — yes, very hammy — fist pumping “fight, fight, fight!” kind of contradicts that.
Just ahead of news of the shootings at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Netroots Nation 2024 closed in Baltimore with a dialogue between a Palestinian and Israeli, friends who both lost family and friends in the violence along the Gaza border last year and in Gaza itself since. Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon work together for peace to prove peace is possible. Crying together can be healing. The dialogue was inspiring.
Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas earlier urged attendees not to lose our shit. He did not support Biden during the 2020 primaries; he backed Elizabeth Warren. Nevertheless, Black primary voters in South Carolina chose the most boring candidate in the race (Biden) … who won and turned out to be a pretty great president.
Democrats, he reminded the audience, have over performed the polls since 2018, They’ve won ballot initiatives everywhere. Meantime, Trump underperformed in his primaries. Republicans tell pollsters they support Trump, but then don’t show up for him. We are in uncharted territory where polls are concerned.
His message: Don’t Panic. We’ve got this.
Shortly later, we heard about the attempted assassination in Pennsylvania.
The world is upside down. Irony isn’t dead, but it is cruel.
