Trump is Shot. Is Biden?
Breaking the Silence On The Big Events
I’ve been schtum on the June 27 Presidential debate because I have zero power to affect the decision of whether Biden should remain in the race and I had to parse all the various arguments for and against him remaining. Then some idiot tried to take out Trump yesterday, and the world’s losing its mind. Since the mind-losing on the Democratic side started with the debate, I’ll combine the two here with some general observations.
So, Trump Got Shot
Pro-Tip: If the worst person in line for the Presidency is going to survive an assassination attempt, it’s best for that to happen while you’re midway through It’s Only Life After All on Netflix with your honey because the Indigo Girls documentary is about hope and endurance and two queer women who saved countless lives over thirty-plus years (including mine).
Even my instant reaction—Well, that sumbitch just won the election—couldn’t compete with the retrospective on Amy Ray and Emily Saliers and the communities they shaped and shaped them. A year or so ago, an old friend we hadn’t seen since college visited, and she asked me how come I hadn’t turned into, well, let’s just say, a guy with reflective wraparound shades who records videos in his truck. I think it was dwelling in the Indigo Girls for three decades. They kept me from becoming a dick. Or as much of one as I might have.
But we can’t roll back time, so y’all found out about Trump’s Really Bad Experience at Claire’s in the Mall however you found out about it. Thoughts and points in the middle of the maelstrom:
Try to Unplug. The disinfo people are right about not speculating or sharing speculations, but of course that ship sailed when it was just two planks and some string. Hell, in the seven minutes I spent on the video before returning to try to get “Closer to Fine,” I found the apparent angles of the attack inconsistent with any visible injuries in the crowd behind TFG, so I was open to the false flag stuff just as much as anybody. But the news was nine minutes old, so I just put it in a box and went back to what I could control: very, very little, but at least I was there with my real spouse and parasocial comrades of three decades to remind me that there is goodness and beauty in the world.
Upside. You can use the downtime to workshop your jokes. I’m trying out “Now THAT’S a NeverTrumper!” but I think it’s too niche. I see somebody already photoshopped together a portrait of the con artist with bandaged ear, dammit.
The Instantly Obvious. Seriously, though, some things are painfully obvious. Trump thrives on personal (not policy) attention, so this is a dream come true for him. The efforts to focus on the fill-in-the-blanks pre-made agenda Heritage and others have worked up for his return will be that much harder to promulgate because this plays directly into the ingrained problems of the two parties: the GOP is driven by ideological symbolism, while the Dems are too wedded to piecemeal policy arguments about what will hurt its various constituencies. The photo of bloody Trump, fist raised, flag in background—he couldn’t waterboard someone for a better campaign image. On top of his utter amorality, of course, people immediately jumped to the notion that it was either staged or set up to be a near miss, as conspiratorial as that may be. (By the way, it’s not healthy for a society when the non-conspiracists quickly and easily entertain conspiracies, which goes to show how brain worms are contagious and the poisoning of the town well kills everybody who lives there regardless of which flags they fly.)
Spare Yourself the Winger Blather. Speaking of conspiracies, of course the mouth-foamers will go nuts—have already gone nuts with this. These people invented a child trafficking ring in a pizza joint’s basement that didn’t have a basement until a dude showed up armed to liberate the kiddos imprisoned there. Alex Jones walked freely for years raking in the bank insisting slaughtered children were false flags until the courts finally started taking away his assets. QAnon? Stop the Steal? I’m not creative enough, but I assume they are insisting the shooter is a lib-Dem antifa who registered R to infiltrate, and/or was mind-controlled by Biden to get everybody to stop talking about how infirm he is. It’s probably so, so much worse and more crazy than than.
Me Talk Good, Especially When Freaking Out. Oh, and it’s probably happening already, but the Dems will botch the messaging, and that includes the pundits. They’ll call for civility and unity. They’ll insist we don’t resolve our political differences with bullets, but rather with ballots, that there’s never any excuse for violence. This has been the Dem line throughout the Trump Administration and during his exile, of course, and the GOP ignored it all, made fun of it, rejected it by tripling down on jokes about political violence, stochastic violent rhetoric of their own, Otherizing and hint-hint-nudge-nudging their supporters to become violent. Hell, the GOP itself bowed to the spectre of base violence when they refused to turn on Trump every chance they had. They know the power of intimidation. And comfortable liberals fear little more than social disorder, as much as they may talk about the importance of social progress. So we’ll hear tons of sloppily drafted condemnations of violence and mean and demonizing rhetoric, and the NYT will claim that the Dems are just as much at fault in this because they dared to call Trumpism fascistic, which it fucking well is. Which means that the best hope of explaining to freedom-loving Americans that Trump and the GOP represent the end of anything resembling self-governance and political accountability in this already deeply-flawed country—that democracy is at stake and these people are authoritarian fascist theocratic wannabes who absolutely have to be defeated—is going to be framed now as “too divisive” to use in stump speeches going forward. Biden’s already pulled his ads for the moment. Just in time for the GOP convention, we’ll see history rewritten as the Rs paint the Ds as violent dangers to our way of life and the Ds will be too afraid of being complicit in some vague social disruption to return to “Trump is a threat to the nation” rhetoric.
Reagan was 43 Years Ago. Understand something, however: this isn’t John Hinckley’s America anymore. I still remember the classic SNL episode where every 3.5 seconds, they kept breaking into the show to tell us that Reagan had been shot. We’ve become accustomed to mass shootings in a way that indicts us at a deep level. Of course we’ll hear shameless garbage from GOP pols condemning the shooting. They who block every effort to pass overwhelmingly popular gun restrictions, they who foment violent responses to political disagreements through both stochastic terrorism and systemically violent policy, they whose Supreme Court just overruled the Trump-era ban on bump stocks. If Biden had wanted Trump dead, thanks to SCOTUS’ presidential immunity ruling, the shooter wouldn’t have been a 20-year-old nobody; he’d have been a military sniper with a support team, and the Secret Service would have had orders to stand the hell down. But Biden isn’t that kinda guy, whereas Trump most definitely is. When it’s about power for me, not thee, hypocrisy loses its sting at worst and becomes a selling point at best. But the idea that someone would try to shoot a presidential candidate is not by any means the wackiest idea out there for the generations that have grown up since Columbine, Parkland, et cetera ad nauseum. Saying “of course” here isn’t meant to normalize any of this morally, just to ask What the hell do you expect from a world you fuckers built to predictably churn out such outcomes? I think Millennials and Gen Z have a fundamentally different view of such things compared to Xers and Boomers.
Maybe Democracy Should Die. Speaking of Boomers, by which I mean the trope of people of any age unplugged from reality due to privileged experiences, I read this snippet of in-the-moment reaction: “So sad and UNNECESSARY! Over POLITICS! Come on! Seriously. What is WRONG with people?!” Tell me you don’t have a clue about the impact of “politics” without telling me you don’t have a clue about the impact of “politics.” I honestly don’t know what to do with such people. Do they imagine that elections are just American Idol contests and the winner simply reaps fame and a title for a while until the next competition? That who is president determines who lives and dies in this country thanks to policy and personnel choices, and that the tolls are orders of magnitude higher than what happened in Butler, PA? SCOTUS made the presidency into an immunized kingship at the same time they criminalized the status of homelessness, despite what Gorsuch sophisticated. They They gathered unto themselves the sovereign power to overrule any regulation on clean water, air, industry, food, drugs, you-name-it, on the grounds that they know better than anyone. They overruled the ATF to relegalize bump stocks, which, if Thomas Matthew Crooks had possessed the right gear, would have enabled him to frag damn near every human being in attendance at Trump’s rally. And “politics” is the process by which those fuckers got their lifetime, graft-lined, unaccountable seats. Trump appointed three of them.
The Devil’s NOT in the Details. All of us sifting through every breaking story that adds one more iota of fact (which may be retracted in the next breaking news story) should really drop a quaalude. All that is going to matter here is the picture of Trump with his fist in the air. Maybe they’ll throw together a montage of some of the other pix as well. Nobody on the sane side of the political spectrum is going to claim this did not happen. So shared reality will have to concede that somebody tried and failed to whack the guy. Any campaign material or speech content at his rallies that references this stuff is therefore stipulated. Our side has to grant it, basically. Sure, he can claim it’s a plot by Biden or antifa or whoever to take him out, and that will go to the identity and motives of the shooter and that forest of details, but the main thing is the image. If the photographers had been patriots, every one of them would have slapped their lens caps on the instant the shots rang out, but that goes against all their training and instincts. None of our digging is going to matter. Trump’s base doesn’t care about facts that complicate their mythos. It’ll be nice to know all the verifiable facts about all this, but those won’t determine the election this year. The pictures and the Democratic response are what matter.
Biden’s Cover Version of “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Talk about a Clash (ba-dum-bum)! Ever since the debate, this has been The Topic: Biden Too Old? Biden or Harris or an as yet Unspecified Democrat? RFK maybe? Wacky for Whitmer! The Squad Stays Loyal to Joe! Betrayed by Dem insiders who MUST have known of Biden’s decrepitude! Open convention! But wait—he gave a great rally/speech/interview/press conference! Speed Date Town Halls conducted by Oprah! ELECTABILITY! Who, O Lord, will save your people?
I haven’t wanted to write about this because all the worst takes on the planet have emerged, and I have no power whatsoever to affect any of it, so it strikes me as pointless, but some things need to be noted:
The Media Sucks, But Biden’s Condition IS Scandalous. The mainstream media is pissed about Biden’s condition as revealed at the debate. Reporters hate being lied to. Okay, they hate being lied to (a) by political actors they believe actually have agency and the capacity for shame (the Democrats) (b) when the old rules still apply, that is, when they are not tossed out the window in the name of clicks and ratings (which is the case for anything Republicans do). Different games, here, people. For a year or so, the White House has been insisting the Biden Too Old stuff was malarkey. Hell, that’s half of the appeal of the Dark Brandon memes. Just as it was kinda-sorta starting to abate, and the very early presidential debate was supposed to put it to rest for good, Biden looked like a dementia patient and utterly tanked. Yes, Trump lied his ass off, but that’s the dog-bites-man story. What was news was that we had video and audio evidence, seen by millions, that contradicted the story the White House had been selling for months and months and months. Yes, the press had covered the “Is Biden too old?” issue, but they’d been scolded by the White House and insider Dems for it, as falling for bullshit, bad-faith, right-wing smear campaigns. And then it sure as hell looked very, very factual. The media bias that matters here is that in media minds, only Dems are supposed to uphold norms and institutions and try to hem to some shared reality of facts and accountability at least more or less at least most of the time. The Republicans have shown that they don’t care about that, and they’ve shown it so often, so thoroughly, so blatantly, and pointing this out becomes (1) boring to readers/viewers, (2) a slog to document and show, irrelevant to the GOP base and now assumed by the rest of the country and thus to the horserace polls, (3) fodder for bad-faith attacks on the media on the grounds that they are “biased against Republicans,” and (4) potentially perilous for media companies if Republicans win power and seek retribution. So when the Dems perpetrate what the media sees as a massive fraud about Biden’s age and ability for so long, they treat it as if it’s on par with the 10s of 1000s of rapid-fire lies Trump spewed throughout his term, all rolled into one gigantic betrayal by the only remaining folks who are supposed to be playing semi-square with them and the American people, at least according to the old rules and norms.
Be Angry At Handlers and Insiders. No, this doesn’t exonerate both-sides coverage over the past however many years that ignored or downplayed or intentionally muted the stark contrast between Trump’s and the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism. (Turn? More like their coming out party.) But media outrage over Biden’s performance and what it implies about the Administration’s straight shooting isn’t by any means illegitimate. More Democrats should be more pissed about this, too. Just who they should be pissed at is trickier to say. Biden himself might be the last to realize his own diminishment, especially if Franklin Foer’s portrait of POTUS as narcissist holds water. That leaves family, close aides and insiders.
We’re Not Immune. Which brings us to “Blue MAGA,” the ride-or-die Dems who cannot abide any questioning of Dear Leader Joe in much the same way Trumpists cannot bear to question TFG’s bona fides or legitimacy. I didn’t use to think it was so much of a real thing, but I’m seeing it even locally. Look, I am about the farthest thing possible from a political cheerleader. In fact, anything with “cheer-” in it just doesn’t describe me. It would probably do one of those matter-antimatter things and tear a hole through all of space-time if the word got too close. But I recognize the social need for cheerleaders. I don’t like it. I wish we could do away with it in a lot of senses, but yeah, it’s the world we live in. People need to be enthused about their political choices and votes and activities. They need to get kinda jazzed up. The perennial problem is the ensuing groupthink that insists we must never criticize “our guy” at any point in the process, lest we either give aid and comfort to his bad faith critics on the other side or else dampen the enthusiasm so vital for GOTV efforts. Which implies that citizen political responsibility is really just a kind of happy fugue state we enter into and really never leave. I think a huge driver of it is the phenomenon whereby a person hatches or latches onto an opinion, adopts it without much context or background to leaven it, and then, because it’s now “their” view, they must defend that possession against all who would attempt to seize, sully or swap it for something else. We simply suck at entertaining temporary and conditional hypotheses, not to mention becoming informed on historical contexts and broader implications. We rail all the time about how Trumpists make TFG and whatever talking points come down the pike each week their personal brand and identity, but when we read a “take” that momentarily jives with our inclinations and priors, we’ll scoop it up, add it to our kit bag of identitarianism as libs or Dems or whatever, and not bat an eye. We might couch it in a “I might be wrong, but…” but follow the discourse a while, and you start to see the same recourses to conspiracism, common-sense plausibility, deflection, peace-making despite leaving the question unexamined, etc.
The Last Institutionalists are Gonna Be…Nimble and Responsive? As for the idea of replacing Biden, it’s a Hail Mary, but we probably need one. And we probably won’t get it, because he almost certainly won’t step down absent some kind of insider intervention, and as far as I can guess, the insiders have all the wrong incentives to so intervene. Could an exciting open convention rejuvenate the party’s image? Sure. And it needs it. But I try never to underestimate the Democrats’ ability to fuck things up, owing, I suspect, to a fundamental disconnect from the “vibes” of the country, gerontocratic paradigms of what’s workable and possible, a slavish adherence to risk aversion, and a kind of fragmented individualistic focus on each Democrat’s electoral chances now and into the future, assuming there is one. Can you picture Democrats stepping down from races in order to let better-placed candidates move forward to overcome right-wing authoritarians, as we just saw in France? I know the two systems are apples and oranges, but the closest analogy would be…Biden stepping aside to let a better positioned campaigner make one hell of a last-ditch effort to save democracy and the entirety of the anti-Trump, anti-Project 2025, anti-Christian Nationalist theocracy movement fall in behind without incessant infighting. For just another 100 days. Yeah, I don’t really see it, either. Literally every observer worth a damn has argued that whatever we managed to achieve in terms of democracy in America wouldn’t be defeated from outside, but by us pissing it away, and as much as I’d love to see a great, final rally by the forces of good even if things turn out to be a fait accompli (if only to inspire distant future generations with a worthy Lost Cause mythos to preserve), I fear that Dems aren’t up to it. Ironically, I think it has something to do with their socialized inability to conceive of themselves as ideologues fighting an ideology in an ideological life-or-death battle for the nation.
The Shot That Killed The Great Replacement (No, The Other Great Replacement). Looks like Trump’s shooting has put the kibosh on most of the talk about replacing Biden anyhow. Whether that’s because Dems can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, because the shooting means drop everything for now, or because the shooting means Trump has effectively already won in their minds, I don’t know. But it all went down in the midst of Biden lobbying (and I guess yelling at) various Congressional Dem constituencies about how he’s fit and fine and capable of beating TFG. All of that action has ceased for the time being.
I don’t know what to tell you except that the big picture is still in play and still not completely doomy, although I won’t place bets. If Trump loses, I suspect it will be despite the campaign efforts and choices of so many Democrats in positions of power and influence, not because of them. That is, it’ll be because the actual American people pleasantly surprise the hell out of people like me.
If you pray, slip that one in for me, would you?