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GELFAND’S WORLD - The shooting: This was entirely predictable. Not because it was Donald Trump, or at least not entirely because it was him, but because mass shootings have become part and parcel of American life. A few hours after the attempt on Trump, there was a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama which killed 4 and wounded another 9 or 10. And just in the past 10 days, between July 5 and July 14, there were 25 mass shootings in this country. The news has been pointing out that there were 19 killed and 86 wounded during the extended Fourth of July interval. In a previous decade it would have resulted in calls for gun control, but was lost in the noise this time around.
Trump is an authority figure, as are all presidents, so he is an obvious target of a particular sort of mind. Anyone with popular appeal such as John Lennon becomes a target. And, sadly enough, anyone who fits the term homo sapiens has become a target, if you happen to be unlucky enough. I can remember the shots fired from behind me and then from right in front, just because I was unlucky enough to be present at what turned out to be a murder for hire.
Of course, the right wingers are blaming the shooting on Joe Biden's political rhetoric, on the grounds that pointing out that Trump is an authoritarian, and a Fascist somehow should not have been said. Might I remind the reader that it was Trump, not Biden, who put caveats on whether or not he would accept the result of an election in which he loses, and who has predicted -- in the event of such a loss -- that there will be a bloodbath.
So, this weekend's fervent calls for people to cool the rhetoric and turn down the heat are not wrong, but a little upside down. The heat has been turned up since the moment that Donald Trump tried to rob Barack Obama of his essential humanity by calling into question Obama's American citizenship. Ask the Secret Service whether they had to investigate plot after plot against President Obama.
The heat has certainly been up since the January 6, 2021 riots that were attempting to overturn the American Constitutional order, and which resulted in so many deaths and injuries. And it's not at all irrelevant that at the January 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riots, Trump was warned by the authorities that the people he wanted admitted to the rally were carrying guns. Trump continued to call for their admission (in spite of the magnetometers) because they weren't there to shoot at him. Or at least that's what he said.
What's the likelihood that Trump supporters will take a second look at the easy availability of semiautomatic weapons in this country? My prediction is going to be that they won't, because the Republican coalition is too tied to the position of unrestricted gun ownership.
Paul Campos over at Lawyers Guns & Money provides the simple explanation of the shooter. The shooter was another misfit loser. Here is the story. After reviewing a series of assassination attempts, he concludes:
"The moral of all this is that we live in a country where unhinged loners, who are about as far away from being professional assassins as its possible to be, can still come close to or one case actually succeed in killing occupants, past and possibly future, of the Oval Office, despite the vast resources that are dedicated to trying to keep this from happening. This might possibly have something to do with the 300 million or so guns/firearms/weapons (apologies to the ammosexuals for getting the terminology wrong in some way probably) floating around, along with enormous amounts of social alienation, a culture obsessed with fame and unable to distinguish it from notoriety, and lots of untreated mental illness, Undercooked political ideology marinating in the fever swamps of the Internet is now also no doubt playing a role, but again I suspect it was a secondary factor in this particular case, and in the cases to come, as things fall apart and the center does not hold."
And Yet Another Story: The latest Aileen Cannon treachery
Word comes down this Monday morning that federal judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the federal indictment against Donald Trump in the case where he took, held, and refused to return secret documents. You remember -- all those top-secret files including details of our nuclear submarine capabilities -- the secrets he shared with a foreign national (although this time it was an Australian instead of a Russian).
Judge Cannon didn't dismiss the case because there were no documents, or because Trump didn't have them at Mar a Lago until the FBI took them back. She didn't dismiss the case because the documents were held properly in a secured facility, because they weren't.
She dismissed the case on the excuse that the special prosecutor should not have been appointed in the way that he was.
It's a curiously weak argument, and one wonders whether the logic would also have to be applied to Hunter Biden (or Richard Nixon) should this ruling be upheld. But there are a couple of likely results. The first of course is that the prosecution will be delayed, even if it eventually is brought back following an appeal. A second possible result might be that Cannon would no longer be the judge in a new prosecution. That is something hugely to be desired.
Of course, the continued prosecution of Donald Trump in the federal courts for his many crimes depends on him losing the presidential election. Trump is staking a lot on that roll of the dice.
Considering the Media Response
I watched the evening replay of Meet the Press so you wouldn't have to. Chuck Todd has been replaced recently by Kristen Welker as host. She led off the discussion using somber tones -- almost funereal -- referring to the tragedy and all that. It is true that a spectator was killed while attempting to shield his family, and the media have been playing that part up. But the guests on the show and Welker were talking as if Donald Trump himself is some kind of heroic martyr rather than a guy whose wound doesn't match up to what a high school football player receives routinely. Perhaps we are getting incomplete information, and Trump suffered some sort of brain injury due to the shock wave of a bullet colliding with the skull (known to happen), but nobody in the Trump camp, nor any members of the media, have been playing up that possibility. Probably Trump suffered a graze to the upper ear, not too much different from the sort of wound inflicted on a skin cancer patient in the matter of excising the tumor. Happens every day, all over the country.
But they went on -- let me repeat the word Funereal as their tone -- and that even included Bernie Sanders. They do have a point, which is that we are supposed to make decisions by electing people or rejecting them at the ballot box, not by assassination. And it's also true that the Democrats and independent journalists have been saying some strong things about Trump, including his promises to overstep the lawful bounds of his office should he be reelected. But none of them pointed out the obvious asymmetry, in that it has always been Trump and his followers who support and engage in violence. Nobody seemed to remember the police officers who suffered -- and a few who died -- as a result of the January 6 Capitol riots. And rather brutally to the point, nobody remembered to mention the women who were denied proper medical care even as they were going through miscarriages and tubal pregnancies.
Long ago, one commenter pointed out that unlike the center-left, the right wing in this country has its own underground military, and right wingers have celebrated the assassination and attempted assassinations of abortion doctors. Some of their number laughed and made jokes about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.
There was one commenter I saw who mentioned the asymmetry. Major Garrett pointed it out in the short period he was allowed to speak on CBS on Sunday.
And One Final Curiosity
One might conjecture that the shooting helped Donald Trump enormously, in that he managed to do his Manchurian Candidate pose, complete with blood dripping down his face and his outstretched fist. Comedian Bill Maher almost immediately forecast an easy Trump victory.
I'm not so sure. Remember that I have been pointing out Biden's weaknesses and calling for him to step down in a couple of previous columns. But this time around, Biden may have won the day. He responded in the right way (you might say the politically correct way), he looked and sounded presidential, and he spoke to the political opposition as equal human beings. He spoke against violence in American politics and joined in the request to cool the rhetoric.
In short, Biden handled a crisis in the calm and measured way that a president is supposed to.
If there was one thing that would take the nation's mind off the presidential debate, perhaps this was it. I score this round to Biden. Barely, but to Biden.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
