The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator
Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others.
By David Frum
https://archive.ph/6s4Y8#selection-701.0-744.0

July 14, 2024, 10:37 AM ET
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then�House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump�s sons and other
close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had
somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally.
He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted �Lock
her up.� Trump laughed and replied, �Lock them all up.�
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked
the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election�many of them threatening harm to
Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence�Trump has championed the
invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and
hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own
staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on
television.
Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has
touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump�and the killing of a
person nearby�is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the
man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret
Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him
is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so
close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential
candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence �has
no place� in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and
pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has
remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump
supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump
and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining
political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer
martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built
imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves
on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the
basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism
The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an
elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself
and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and
trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S.
voters, but that minority�s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks
in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the
iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to �Fight!� to
summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-
constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the
Supreme Court.
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Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some
extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat,
civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy
is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief
spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of
social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after
years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are
declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country�s
problems indirectly confirm the country�s success: Migrants are crossing
the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if
Americans don�t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.
Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-
harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national
failures: letting the author of a failed coup d��tat return to office to
try again.
One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society
is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once
those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, �radical� in
U.S. politics has usually meant �fringe�: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black
Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be
marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches
from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy
or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in
the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted
stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions
of state, they flared up and burned out.
Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful
constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major
parties. He has defeated�or is on the way to defeating�every impeachment
and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has
assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more
national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated
the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can
use yesterday�s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his
life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an
alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even
the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of
the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because
he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done
otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it�s
awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American
state�though that�s what Trump was and is.
David Frum: Biden�s heartbreaking press conference
The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to
others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective
rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay
and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the
additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump�s legitimacy. In the
face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress
unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that
divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.
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.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to
its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin�s Russia and its aggression against
U.S. allies. Trump�s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships
has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these
urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of
�thoughts and prayers� for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a
prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The
president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to
own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such
assault rifle.
Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social
life. We say �Thank you for your service� both to the decorated hero and to
the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It�s easier than
deciphering which was which. We wish �Happy New Year!� even when we dread
the months ahead.
Adrienne LaFrance: Thoughts, prayers, and Facebook rants aren�t enough
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.
Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American
life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021.
All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump�s reckoning should
be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in
when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman�s vicious
criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones.
Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the
language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all
intolerable�and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a
bullet�s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of
law and democracy.