Assassinations Have Been Historically Effective

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life last night. In a nation that venerates guns and violence, it’s the risk we take. Many people are saying that political violence is never acceptable, but everyone knows that comes with a big asterisk. Our country was forged in political violence, and has regularly exercised it in the 248 years since. The lesson is that political violence is good in the right circumstances. 

As for their function, assassinations may be abhorrent and shocking—but they are effective. Look at history. We don’t know if RFK would have won the presidency in 1968, but a bullet meant he never got the chance. A right-wing extremist wanted to prevent Yitzhak Rabin from signing a peace deal with the Palestinians, and in killing him he did so. That treaty never got signed. How would Lincoln have handled reconstruction had he gotten the chance? Certainly lot differently than Andrew Johnson, the Southern Democrat who served as his VP. These assassinations were condemned at the time, but they worked as political solutions. 

(I’ll just note here that a recent decision by the Supreme Court legalized bump stocks, which can be used to turn a regular weapon into an automatic weapon. Of course, at some point we will see the bloody consequences of this decision.)

As I read the news after the shooting in Pennsylvania, I thought about the larger context. The Supreme Court has also just ruled that presidents acting in their official capacity are above the law. Donald Trump has promised to punish his political rivals and be dictator “for a day.” We know that if Trump is elected, he will be unrestrained by law or norms. It’s a very real threat to democracy as we’ve known it. On the other side, while Joe Biden is a completely normal president, Trump’s fans believe he is a criminal and that his reelection means the end of America (Trump: “you won’t have a country anymore”). 

Even before the shooting, we had reached an existential crisis in which half the voters believed electing one or the other man would be the end of the democratic experiment. (That one of these scenarios is laughably false does not change its reality in the minds of the people who believe it.) Someone taking a shot at Trump, in this context, seems less like an aberration than an inevitability. It is hard to look forward and not see a lot of violence and chaos in our future. Based on the overheated language I’ve seen online, Trump fans are promising it. (Notable: the 20-year-old shooter was apparently a registered Republican.)

The conditions for violence are everywhere, the conditions for deescalation and normalcy largely absent, especially now. Perhaps we’ll have a normal election and people will accept the results—and this shooting will look like a strange anomaly looking back. 

I wouldn’t bet on it.