The bullets and the blame

Whatever else is said about the events at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania yesterday afternoon, one thing remains true: someone left their home to attend a political rally, to see a presidential candidate speak, and never returned home.

The Secret Service is perhaps the best close protection team in the world, or at least has that reputation. The history of US is a history of political violence: four US presidents have been assassinated in office, candidates have been assassinated, and there have been many more foiled attempts. If people cannot be safe at events protected by a team such as that, they cannot be safe anywhere. There will be questions enough for the Service to answer in time, but if nothing else the attack on Trump shows that there is only so much that can be done in a country of 300 million people and 400 million guns to protect people – even the best security has its limits.

In a way that is not true of any other Western country, the US has a studied, almost rote, response to prominent gun violence. Politicians send “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families. This is followed by a call for unity and calm across the nation, and concluded with a reminder not to politicise this (latest) senseless tragedy before the facts are known.

The Democrats are sticking to that playbook: within minutes there were widespread condemnations of political violence, expressions of relief that Trump himself was only lightly injured, and even an effort from Biden himself to speak directly with Trump. Biden, Obama, the Clintons and every Democrat of note had a message of this sort out within hours of the attack.

Republicans decided to do something different. It was inevitable that Trump outriders such as the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones – who is currently going through bankruptcy over debts of hundreds of millions for the defamation of the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting – would quickly say Trump had survived an attempt to kill him by the “Deep State”. Trump has embraced the conspiratorial far-right, and they were never going to have a rational or constructive response to an event like this one.

More significant, and more troubling, is the response of what we would once have called ‘mainstream’ Republicans. JD Vance, once best known as the author of the bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy”, is now the Republican senator for Ohio and is widely tipped to be Trump’s pick as vice president at the party convention this week.

Before anything was known about the shooter or his motivations – nothing is public still at the time of writing – Vance said that Joe Biden’s rhetoric had “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”. Other Republicans pointed to a Biden campaign quote saying that the party needed to move past questions of Biden’s candidacy and “put Trump in a bullseye”.

The history of US presidential assassins, and would-be assassins, is one of irrational motivations. The stories have rarely been simple: some have been conspiracists, some obsessed with celebrity, some motivated by personal and obscure grudges. Unsurprisingly, mental illness has figured prominently. Given that making an attempt on a presidential candidate is all but guaranteed to end in a swift death, the act is rarely a “rational” one spurred by straightforward politics.

Whatever those motivations were, Republican pearl-clutching at violent political rhetoric looks grimly insincere. Even as they point to the Democratic reaction to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011, which highlighted campaigns showing her head in a gunsight, they ignore their own party’s recent history with violent incitement.

Until the Supreme Court intervened earlier this month, Donald Trump was due to face trial later this year over his role in inciting a violent attack on the US Capitol. Trump had led a rally in Washington DC, spurred rioters to march, and had even allegedly tried to join the march on the Capitol in his presidential motorcade.

Five people died in that attack, and armed rioters came within yards of the Senate chamber. If Republicans now accept that using charged language such as “in a bullseye” can contribute to political violence, then they need to zoom out and consider what effect leading a mass insurrection against the Senate does – especially when Trump has repeatedly promised to pardon all of those involved in the attack.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Trump brought this appalling act on himself. Yet he has turned up the temperature of US politics for as long as he has been a presence within it. Only by stressing that politics is settled at the ballot box and nowhere else – and that what happens at the ballot box is final – will troubled waters be calmed.

Those who have been put at risk from year after year of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and outright instigation of political violence have been quick to condemn the violence against the president and his supporters. Those who have turned a blind eye to Trump’s wrongdoing have not hesitated to launch hypocritical attacks on his opponents.

By doing so, they surprise no-one, but they show the hollowness of their supposed morality and the shallowness of their characters. Americans, even those who despise Donald Trump, were set to rally towards him against political violence. Republicans have shown their total inability to meet even a moment like this.