This is frighteningly close to reality.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Trump is getting so cocky. He picks Vance which was a mistake. And then this:
Uh huh.
Honestly, this surprises me. I thought he’d have her at the convention sitting in the audience for his speech. And maybe he will. But not to have called her immediately was a huge error.
“My view on this has been very clear. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live even though those circumstances of the child’s birth is inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
This is absurd! Trump VP Pick JD Vance calls rape an "inconvenience"
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) July 15, 2024
When asked about not allowing women to have an abortion when they are the victims of rape or incest, his response is disgusting. It's as if he's a character from the Handmaids Tale.
“My view on this has been… pic.twitter.com/Fv8nbhfsbI
Clearly, Trump has decided to just say “fuck it, I’m going for it.” He thinks he can just bulldoze his way into the White House with little resistance because Biden whiffed in the debate.
We’ll see about that. A lot more women than men vote in every election. Even more will vote this time.
From Jessica Valenti’s newsletter “Abortion Every Day”
A recent poll from Axios/Ipsos, for example, that shows that 81% of Americans believe abortion “should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” And this is huge: 4 in 5 Americans don’t want pregnancy to be legislated. That includes over half of Republicans!
We’ve seen multiple polls showing the same thing: Americans want abortion to be legal.(Check out research from PerryUndem for more evidence of this massive and growing support.)
There’s also broad support for mifepristone and misoprostol access amid the political attacks seeking to ban the medication. Polls show 7 in 10 Americans support abortion medication (including one from Fox News), which underscores how much Americans support medication access, regardless of party affiliation.
That’s because Americans increasingly understand that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate. A poll commissioned by Planned Parenthood, for example, found that the messages resonating most with voters are those emphasizing that medical decisions should be made by patients and doctors, not politicians, and those highlighting how wholly unqualified politicians are to have a say.
This support translates to elections, too: Abortion rights have won every time they’ve been on the ballot since Dobbs. Polls also show that 2 in 3 Americans would vote to codify abortion rights into their state constitutions—including nearly half of Republicans. And voters overwhelmingly reject efforts to brand abortion restrictions as ‘middle-ground compromises’ (like their proposal for a national 15-week ban).
All of this terrifies Republicans. That’s why anti-abortion legislators in multiple states are trying to stall or stop abortion rights ballot measures—even if it means undoing democracy in the process. They’ve tried to raise ballot measure standards and written false or misleading language in ballot summaries; they’ve attempted to get the courts to reject abortion rights amendments and have their Attorney Generals to upend the iniative process. And they’re working with anti-abortion groups throughout that process.
All of which is to say, the anti-abortion movement relies on the myth that abortion is just a matter of disagreement, rather than the truth: public officials are upending democracy to bring a landscape of devastation throughout our healthcare system that harms the lives of millions across the country.
And that’s more than a matter of numbers.
Vance on the ticket is going to supercharge the abortion rights movement which is already highly organized. I thought Trump was smarter than this. But I suspect he was so thrilled with Vance’s tweet blaming Biden for the shooting on Saturday that it tipped the balance. It certainly didn’t hurt him. I guess Trump forgot about the abortion problem which, up until now, he’s been acutely aware could hurt him. He’s cocky. But this race is still very, very close.
This article by David Frum sums him up perfectly. Apparently, Vance used to write for Frum a decade or so ago and was part of his inner circle who said he was modeling his career on Barack Obama. Frum thought he was a thoughtful “reforminst conservative” who “scorned culture-warring, valued expertise, endorsed social inclusion, rejected partisan rancor, and supported America’s important role in world security.” He thought he was sincere. And he wasn’t the only one:
Before the 2016 election, Vance’s future political path looked straightforward. He would await the expected Trump defeat, then emerge as a next-generation Republican savior: a candidate who could speak from his origins in Appalachia to the suburbs of Columbus, all while preserving his connections to his donors in Silicon Valley.
Trump’s Electoral College victory complicated the calculation. Some Democrats wooed Vance to change parties. Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod had Vance as a guest on his popular podcast the month after Vance’s Times article was published.
It turned out, as we know, that Vance was actually a very ambitious con man, as are so many who see the Republican party as nothing more than a collection of marks — which is correct. Frum watched as Vance morphed into a hard core wingnut whose “writing and speaking have edged angrier and uglier as he has gained success and prominence.” Yep.
In July 2021, Vance inveighed against the “childless left” who have made no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In November, he attacked fellow Ohioan LeBron James for criticizing Kyle Rittenhouse’s demeanor at his homicide trial: “Lebron is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Total coward.”
In a September podcast, he urged that Trump, upon his hypothetical restoration to office in 2024, purge the government of federal employees who aren’t loyal to him and defy the courts if the purge was held illegal.
When he got the endorsement recently of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who notoriously floated a conspiracy theory about California’s wildfires being started by space lasers associated with “Rothschild Inc.,” he tweeted: “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.”
The former supporter of the Iraq War has turned into one of the nation’s preeminent scorners of Ukraine’s fight for independence, declaring: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” At the end of last month, Vance even suggested that President Joe Biden was plotting intentionally to flood the U.S. with deadly fentanyl: “It does look intentional. It’s like Biden wants to punish people who didn’t vote for him.”
In April of this year, Vance tweeted: “Barack Obama is articulate but has never made a memorable speech. The reason is that his views are utterly conventional. He’s unable of saying anything outside of the elite consensus. He’s a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.” What prompted that highly personal outburst against Vance’s former role model and the magazine to which he himself had contributed his sharpest anti-Trump criticisms? A video clip of Obama speaking negatively of Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin.
I dunno. I read “Hillbilly Elegy” and could smell the smarmy phoniness a mile away. Why so many liberals were taken in I could never understand.
The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one…
So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?
He’s going to be Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee and if they win in November, Trump could easily expire on the golf course and Vance would end up as president of the United States.
It’s a terrifying prospect. This man has all the fascist instincts of Donald Trump but a much better brain. He clearly has no heart. And there is a great void where his soul should be.
Here’s JD before his current shape shift:
Senator Mike Lee, ladies and gentlemen:
Somebody get him a cigarette.
This convention is going to be like one of those ecstatic religious revival meetings. They’ll all be speaking in tongues before it’s over.
Let’s not forget President U.S. Grant who commanded the Union Army or the father of our country George Washington. And many, many more. Not one of them had the pampered richie rich life of Donald Trump, even the ones born into money. His hammy fist bumping as he’s hustled off the stage by a phalanx of secret service agents is the exact opposite of “tough.” The whining about finding his shoes is before they did it was much more indicative of his true self.
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 Sunday with 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:
It didn’t even last the morning.
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.
Everyone said the “right thing” and they used all the comfortable conventional phrases. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic:
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:
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:
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?
Telling the truth is not incitement
“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.
Vox:
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.
Hell no, we won’t back off.
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Tragedy and false equivalence
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.
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The streets are lined with camera crews
Everywhere he goes is news
Today is different
Today is not the same
Today, I’ll make the action
Take snapshot into the light
Snapshot into the light
I’m shooting into the light
– from “Family Snapshot”, by Peter Gabriel
In the wake of the horrific 2016 Orlando nightclub massacre, I wrote:
“Now is not the time to talk about [insert gun-violence related meme here] .” We’ve heard that before; predictably, we’re hearing it again.
But there is something about this mass shooting that screams “Last call for sane discourse and positive action!” on multiple fronts. This incident is akin to a perfect Hollywood pitch, writ large by fate and circumstance; incorporating nearly every sociopolitical causality that has been quantified and/or debated over by criminologists, psychologists, legal analysts, legislators, anti-gun activists, pro-gun activists, left-wingers, right-wingers, centrists, clerics, journalists and pundits in the wake of every such incident since Charles Whitman perched atop the clock tower at the University of Texas and picked off nearly 50 victims (14 dead and 32 wounded) over a 90-minute period. That incident occurred in 1966; 50 years ago this August. Not an auspicious golden anniversary for our country. 50 years of this madness. And it’s still not the appropriate time to discuss? What…too soon? […]
The [shooter’s] motivation: too early to say definitively, but history points to a likelihood of either personal, political, ideological, or perhaps ‘all of the above’.
*sigh* As of this writing, it’s too early to know what the motives were behind yesterday’s assassination attempt that left former President Trump slightly wounded, the shooter and one rally attendee dead and two other rally attendees critically injured. But one element of the event felt uncomfortably familiar to me:
Life imitating art imitating life.
It was also uncomfortably familiar to someone else-for very personal reasons:
Back in January of 2011, in my armchair psychologist’s attempt to answer “Why?” regarding yet another mass shooting, I explored the pathology of the perversely “All-American” phenomenon known as the “lone gunman” via what morphed into a rather comprehensive (wordy?) genre study I dubbed “The American Assassin on Film”.
In the piece, I posed some questions. What is the motivation? Madness? Political beef? A cry for attention? What (beside the perp) is to blame? Systemic racism? Society? Demagoguery? Legislative torpor? The internet? At any rate, in the wake of the latest in this never-ending series of horrific incidents, I feel compelled (sfx *world-weary sigh*) to republish that essay (with a few revisions and additions), just for the sake of my own sanity…and possibly yours.
(The original version of the following essay was posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo January 15, 2011, in reaction to the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords on January 8, 2011)
Although the senseless massacre in Tucson last Saturday that snuffed out six lives and left a congresswoman gravely wounded is still too recent to fully process, I think that it is safe to say that a Pandora’s Box full of peculiarly “American” issues have tumbled out in its wake: the politics of hate, the worship of guns, and the susceptibility of mentally unstable and/or socially isolated individuals to become even more so as the culture steers more toward being “plugged-in”, rather than cultivating meaningful, face-to-face human contact.
The irony of this situation, of course, is that by all accounts, Representative Giffords is a dedicated public servant who thrives on cultivating meaningful, face-to-face human contact with constituents; her would-be assassin, on the other hand, is a person who had become withdrawn from friends and family, living in an increasingly myopic universe of odd obsessions and posting incoherent ramblings on his personal web pages.
While many of us in the blogosphere (including this writer) admittedly could easily be accused of living in a myopic universe of odd obsessions and authoring incoherent posts-I think there is an infinitesimally microscopic possibility that I would ever go on a shooting rampage (I don’t own any weapons, nor have I ever felt the urge to pick one up).
This prompts a question-what is it, exactly that possesses a person to commit such an act-specifically upon a politician or similarly high-profile public figure? Political extremism? Narcissism? Insanity? One from column “a” and one from column “b”?
And even more specifically, why have a disproportionate number of these acts over the last 150 years or so appear to have taken place right here in the good old United States of America, home of the free, land of the brave? Digby blogged earlier this week about Anderson Cooper’s interview with Bill Maher on his AC360 news magazine. Maher made this observation:
“This is the only country in the world that shoots its leaders at the rate that we do. The last time I think a leader was shot in Britain was 1812. Canada has had 15 or 16 prime ministers. How many have been shot? Zero. (America is) a very well-armed country…with a lot of nutty people. And that’s a very bad combination.”
An astute observation. But Maher’s statement can also be read as an oversimplification, which leaves a fair amount of unanswered questions hanging in the air. I don’t pretend to be an expert on such issues-that’s why I’m just the movie guy around here, and not one of the highly respected political pundits who 99.999% of the visitors to this site are here to read and engage in intelligent discourse with.
That being said, I will level with you that it’s been difficult for me to take my “job” as the resident movie critic very seriously since last weekend. I have found this event to be profoundly disturbing, and it gives me a very bad feeling about where this country is headed.
Is this the beginning of the end of the American political system as we know it, or, or we are smart enough to use this as a teachable moment, a catalyst for a new age of enlightenment? It’s up to us. And if that particular concern trumps me pretending to care about how faithful the new Green Hornet film is to the ethos of the old TV show, so be it.
There’s an old adage: “Write about what you know.” So I’ll climb off the soapbox now and go to my “safe place”, which is where I am most comfortable. Since I truly am struggling to make sense of this whole thing, or to at least come to an understanding of how “we” have reached this point, I thought I would use a touchstone I can easily relate to-movies.
That is because when you focus on films within a specific genre, released over your lifetime (in my case, fifty-odd years) hopefully you can get a picture of where we used to be, in relation to where we are now, and maybe even figure out how we got there.
With the exception of The Conspirator (my review) I can’t recall any films that offer significant character studies of the assassins responsible for the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield or McKinley.
So for the purpose of this study, I will begin with a relatively obscure low-budget entry from 1954 called Suddenly. Lewis Allen’s taut 1954 hostage drama/film noir stars a surprisingly effective Frank Sinatra as John Baron, the cold-blooded leader of a three-man hit team who are hired to assassinate the (unnamed) President during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy California town (interestingly, the role of John Baron was originally offered to Montgomery Clift).
The film is essentially a chamber drama; the assassins commandeer a family’s home that affords them a clear shot at their intended target. In this case, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t give me that politics jazz-it’s not my racket!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).
Also in the cast: Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, Christopher Dark, and Paul Frees (Frees would later become known as “the man of a thousand voices” for his voice-over work with Disney, Jay Ward Productions, Rankin/Bass and other animation studios).
Some aspects of the film are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of a European make. Most significantly, there have been more than a few claims over the years in JFK conspiracy circles suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest.
There have been conflicting stories over the years whether Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation following Kennedy’s death; the definitive answer may lie in remarks made by Frank Sinatra, Jr., in a commentary track he did for a 2012 Blu-ray reissue of the film:
[Approximately 2 weeks] after the assassination of President Kennedy, a minor network official at ABC television decided he was going to run Suddenly on network television. This, while the people were still grieving and numbed from the horror of the death of President Kennedy. When word of this reached Sinatra, he was absolutely incensed…one of the very few times had I ever seen him that angry. He got off a letter to the head of broadcasting at ABC, telling them that they should be jailed; it was in such bad taste to do that after the death of President Kennedy.
Sinatra, Jr. does not elaborate any further, so I interpret that to mean that Frank, Sr. fired off an angry letter, and the fact that the film remains in circulation to this day would indicate that it was never actually “pulled” (of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theory).
There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, which was the last assassination thriller of note released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well.
Sinatra plays a Korean War vet who reaches out to help a buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey). Harvey is on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring war nightmares. Sinatra has been suffering the same malady (both men had been held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it dawns on Sinatra that they both may have been brainwashed during their captivity for very sinister purposes, all hell breaks loose.
In this narrative (based on Richard Condon’s novel) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a domestic terrorist programmed by his Communist puppet masters to kill on command. Some of the Cold War references have dated; others (as it turns out) are oddly timely (as I wrote about here quite recently).
After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the sociopolitical turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated by Watergate).
The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.
One of the earliest examples was the 1973 film Executive Action, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
A speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, it offers a scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible.
Frankly, the premise is more intriguing than the film (which is flat and talky), but the filmmakers deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic. Still, it’s worth a watch.
1974 was the banner year, with two outstanding offerings from two significant directors-The Conversation, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula.
The Conversation does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here. It was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out (see my review below).
Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his clients is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects.
Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates the film mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to its timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal).
24 years later, Hackman played a similar character in Tony Scott’s 1998 political thriller Enemy of the State. Some have postulated “he” is the same character (you’ve gotta love the fact that there’s a conspiracy theory about a fictional character). I don’t see that myself; although there is obvious homage with a brief shot of a photograph of Hackman’s character in his younger days that is actually a production still from …The Conversation!
Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller The Parallax View, on the other hand takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a sustainable capitalist venture…if you can perfect a discreet and reliable algorithm for screening and recruiting the right “employees”.
Warren Beatty delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller Blowout is one of his finest efforts. John Travolta stars as a sound man who works on schlocky horror films. While making a field recording of ambient nature sounds, he unexpectedly captures audio of a fatal car crash involving a political candidate, which may not have been an “accident”. The proof lies buried somewhere in his recording-which naturally becomes a coveted item by some dubious characters. His life begins to unravel synchronously with the secrets on his tape.
Obvious echoes of Coppola’s The Conversation aside, the director employs an arsenal of influences (from Antonioni to Hitchcock), but succeeds in making this one of his most “De Palma-esque” with some of the deftest set-pieces he’s ever done (particularly in the climax).
There are two more significant films in this cycle worth a mention-Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) and William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979).
Three Days of the Condor is one of seven collaborations between star Robert Redford and director Sydney Pollack, and one of the seminal “conspiracy-a-go-go” films. With a screenplay adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, this 1975 film offers a twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination.
Here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (no honor among conspirators, apparently). Also with Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
Pollack’s film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. The final scene plays like an eerily prescient prologue for All the President’s Men, which wasn’t released until the following year. An absolutely first-rate political thriller with more twists and turns than you can shake a dossier at.
Winter Kills is one of the more oddball entries in the cycle. Director William Richert adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted for the screen twice).
Jeff Bridges stars as the (apolitical) half-brother of an assassinated president. After witnessing the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a “second gunman”, he reluctantly gets drawn into a new investigation of his brother’s murder nearly 20 years after the matter was allegedly put to rest by the findings of the “Pickering Commission”.
John Huston chews the scenery as Bridges’ father (a larger-than-life character said to be loosely based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.). The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film vacillates between byzantine conspiracy thriller and a broad satire of other byzantine conspiracy thrillers–but is eminently watchable, thanks to an interesting cast and a screenplay that, despite ominous undercurrents, delivers a great deal of dark comedy.
The obvious bookend to this cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film JFK, in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural) is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
There was a mini-“revival” of the cycle during the 2000s, in the form of Niels Mueller’s 2004 true crime drama, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, and Gabriel Range’s 2006 “speculative thriller”, Death of a President (my review).
The Assassination of Richard Nixon, based on thwarted assassin Samuel Byck’s bizarre scheme to kill President Nixon in 1974, is the superior of the two films; but their respective “lone gunmen” share a similar pathology. Nixon’s would-be assassin Byck (Sean Penn) is the classic “angry white male” …a loser in marriage and career who cracks up and holds the President responsible for his own failures.
*SPOILER AHEAD* In Death of a President, the (fictional) assassin of President George W. Bush (a troubled 1991 Gulf War vet who lost his son in the second Iraq war) also holds the POTUS responsible for his personal problems (interestingly, this character is African-American; an anomaly within the typical American political assassin profile).
Even though it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into the “political assassination” category, no examination of the genre would be complete without a mention of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In my review of the 2008 film, The Killing of John Lennon, I wrote:
There is a particularly creepy and chilling moment of “art-imitating-life-imitating-art-imitating life” in writer-director Andrew Piddington’s film, The Killing of John Lennon, where the actor portraying the ex-Beatles’ stalker-murderer deadpans in the voice over:
“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.”
Anyone who has seen Scorsese and Shrader’s Taxi Driver will instantly attribute that line to the fictional Travis Bickle, an alienated, psychotic loner and would be assassin who stalks a political candidate around New York City. Bickle’s ramblings in that film were based on the diary of Arthur Bremer, the real-life nutball who grievously wounded presidential candidate George Wallace in a 1972 assassination attempt.
Although Mark David Chapman’s fellow loon-in-arms John Hinckley would extrapolate even further on the Taxi Driver obsession in his attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981, it’s still an unnerving epiphany in Piddington’s film, an eerie and compelling portrait of Chapman’s descent into alienation, madness and the inexplicable murder of a beloved music icon.
So what is it that (the fictional) Travis Bickle, and real-life stalkers Arthur Bremer, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley (and possibly, the Tucson shooter) all have in common?
They represent a “new” breed of American assassin. They aren’t rogue members of the government’s clandestine community, “patsies” for some deeper conspiracy, or operatives acting at the behest of dark corporate cabals. And although their targets are in most cases political figures, their motives don’t necessarily appear to be 100% political in nature.
More often than not, they are disenfranchised “loners”, either by choice or precipitated by some kind of mental disturbance. Many of them fit the quintessential “angry white male” profile; impotent with rage at some perceived persecution (or betrayal) by specific people, ethnic groups, or society in general.
One thing we do know for sure, and the one thing they all share as U.S. citizens, is that they had no problem getting their hands on a firearm. I know-“Guns don’t kill people. People do.” But still.
So what about that other issue that has come up-the possibility that inflammatory vitriol from high-profile demagogues can trigger homicidal rage from someone who is already starting to crack?
There are at least two films that have breached this scenario, if perhaps only tangentially-Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (1988).
*SPOILERS AHEAD* In Network, written by the late great Paddy Chayefsky, respected news anchor Howard Beale has a mental meltdown on air, announcing his plan to commit public suicide, on camera, in an upcoming newscast.
When the following evening’s newscast attracts an unprecedented number of viewers, some of the more unscrupulous programmers and marketers at the network smell a potential cash cow, and decide to let Beale rant away in front of the cameras to his heart’s content, reinventing him as a “mad prophet of the airwaves” and giving him a nightly prime time slot.
Eventually, some of the truthiness in his nightly “news sermons” hits a little too close to home regarding some secret business dealings that the network has with some Arab investors, and it is decided that his program needs to be cancelled (with extreme prejudice). And besides, his ratings are slipping, anyway. So the network hires a team of hit men to assassinate him on air.
Obviously, this film is satirical in nature, through and through, but the idea of a media demagogue precipitating his own demise by hammering away with inflammatory on-air rants night after night is, in a fashion, oddly prescient of our current political climate.
Talk Radio, on the other hand, does have some grounding in reality, because its screenplay (by Stone and Eric Bogosian) is based on a play (co-written by Bogosian and Tad Savinar), which itself was based on a non-fiction book (by Stephan Singular) about Denver talk show host Alan Berg, who was ambushed and shot to death in his driveway by members of a white nationalist fringe group in 1984. Berg was an outspoken liberal, who frequently targeted neo-Nazis and white supremacists in his on-air rants. Bogosian reprises his stage role as “shock jock” Barry Champlain, who meets with the same fate.
Finally, there is one more film that squeaks into this category-Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). Jeff Bridges plays a successful late night radio talk show host whose career literally crashes overnight after a disturbed fan goes on a murderous shooting spree at an upscale restaurant after he hears the DJ exclaim, “They must be stopped before it’s too late…it’s us or them!” as part of a (tongue-in-cheek) anti-yuppie diatribe on his show.
One can’t help but be reminded of the Rush Limbaugh apologists who always attempt to douse any criticism of his vile hate rhetoric with the tired old “He’s just an entertainer!” meme.
So what can we learn about last Saturday’s shooting by analyzing these particular films, if anything? Frankly, I don’t feel any more enlightened about the “whys” behind this senseless violence than I did when I started this exercise.
Perhaps Bill Maher was not “oversimplifying”, after all, as I postulated earlier. Maybe the equation really is as simple as “A well armed country + A lot of nutty people = A bad combination”.
Is change even possible? Maybe we’re already on the right path by continuing to engage in the dialogue we’re engaged in and asking the questions we’re asking. Then again…like the man said: “Don’t take my word for it. Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
Previous posts with related themes:
The Death Hour: How Hollywood Tried to Warn Us
Conspiracy a go-go (Slight Return)
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley