Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, an assassination attempt was made on presidential candidate Donald Trump. Shots were fired and he was wounded slightly by a bullet hitting his ear, while the shooter was quickly killed by Secret Service agents. Tragically, another rally attendant was also killed in the shooting.
Little is known about the potential assassin other than that he was a 20 year old white male. While I am very deeply opposed to Trump being president again, obviously the use of violence against him is reprehensible.The most likely scenario is that this is the work of one lone person, a sad, lonely man not unlike past presidential assassins, who turned his hatred on a political figure. While we may never know the now dead man's motivation, it really doesn't matter now, what does matter is that in the future shootings like this should be avoided with beefed up security at political events like this. Especially because I'm afraid that a Trump supporter may attempt to extract some revenge on President Biden or other Democrats. Sadly, we live in a country where access to firearms is so simple that it takes only one deranged assassin to make an another attempt.
Interestingly, in our instant reaction social media era, I almost immediately found myself arguing with fellow progressives on Facebook who thought that this whole thing was a false flag. Their assertion was that Trump was doing this to build sympathy for himself just before the Republican convention next week. This seems pretty darn silly to me: why would Trump, who by almost all measures is clearly set to win the White House in November if he's running against President Joe Biden, need to resort to such a wild and over the top method to pump up his base? If Trump wanted to fake an assassination attempt, why wouldn't he have done it back in 2020 when he was still president and running behind Joe Biden in every poll? And that's not even considering the amount of work it would take to pull such fakery off; are we supposed to believe that not only the shooter but also the killed rally attendant are all fakers? And how could he get so many people to sign off on it, from the Secret Service to the police? Like many conspiracy theories, this just doesn't add up.
It would seem that in our deeply divided country, people struggle to express any kind of sympathy for the other side and therefore have to construct a conspiracy theory to explain any tragic event like this. (Remember how conservatives tried to spin an intruder attacking Nancy Pelosi's husband?) But's it always possible to be of two minds about things: Donald Trump is a narcissistic psychopath, a convicted felon and fraud, an adjudicated rapist who has risen to the height of American politics on a wave of bigotry and misogyny. His reecletion would do permanent damage to the American democratic system. None of that justifies violence against him. The only solution to an attack on democracy is to work harder to resist it within that system, as flawed as it may be.
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