The luckiest man on earth is on a real run. In the space of a couple of weeks, his opponent self-destructed in their debate, the Supreme Court gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card and de facto permission to be a dictator (that wasn’t luck, though: he and his party carefully engineered it), and a deranged shooter who was a registered Republican gifted him the chance to act like a martyr. Oh yeah, and two days later a federal judge who lives in his coat pocket capped two years of slow-walking by throwing out a near-slam dunk case against him for stealing nuclear secrets from the US government, freeing him—temporarily at least— from the threat of prison—in that case, at least—and allowing him to (falsely) claim exoneration. And all of it in the run-up to the live informercial that is the GOP convention.

For those who are still wondering, there is no God.

Any one of these things would have been huge news, even if spread out over several months. Instead we got everything everywhere all at once. The United States is going down a fascist rabbit hole, and fast. And while dumb luck has played a role, so has our failure to reckon with this threat. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Biden’s apparent refusal to step aside (he might yet!), combined with that run of outrageous and undeserved good luck, has left many Democrats feeling despondent. The notion that Trump might well win has given way to a few isolated suggestions that he might win in a landslide, to that terrible inversion of a Stevie Nicks ballad becoming the conventional wisdom.

I am not ready to give up. But I am definitely girding myself for the worst. Somebody oughta write a book. 

PAGING SUSAN SONTAG

Last week’s post was titled “The Crisis for Democracy Takes a Very Weird Turn.” This week’s sequel could well have been titled “The Crisis for Democracy Takes YET ANOTHER Very Weird—and Dangerous—Turn.”

Trump has always been a lucky SOB. Part of that is part and parcel of being the feckless heir to obscene, ill-gotten wealth. That’s how he got out of Vietnam, and how he got into business and survived multiple bankruptcies owing to his incompetence, and how he stiffed vendors for decades by bleeding them to death in litigation, and how he avoided criminal liability for his various misdeeds over and over again, and how he got Mark Burnett to resuscitate his career. Part of it is also the natural tactical advantages that come with being a reprehensible, amoral sociopath instead of a decent human being, and part of it, especially lately, has been the cover provided him by allies who stood to gain from that—like the Republican Party. But this week might be the luckiest week of his whole misbegotten life.

So let’s start with the assassination attempt.

Any act of political violence is unconscionable, and it would have been terrible for our country if that shooter had hit his target. (As it stands, one innocent person was killed and two injured.) But the fact that he missed by two inches is one of those moments when history could have been irrevocably changed forever.

Butterfly effect wise, this was one for the ages. If Trump had just been hustled offstage after a stray round whizzed harmlessly by his head, the incident would have been largely forgotten, or at least had far far less impact. If he had been killed by a clean hit, we would have been faced with the terrible specter of him being made a martyr, and the prospect that he would never face judgment at the ballot box, or justice in a courtroom. (He may never face the latter anyway.) But it would undeniably have reshaped American politics and perhaps the whole course of human history. As some wags instantly asked online, “Are we sure that the shooter wasn’t a time traveler from the future?”

Instead, a barely grazed ear is the mildest of injuries that gives Trump the hugest of political benefits, and therefore the worst possible outcome for democracy. I am glad he was not killed or seriously wounded, because I don’t wish that on anyone (unlike many of his supporters). That said, this was a gift from the gods that enables Trump and his cretinous followers to portray him as a hero and a martyr (despite surviving) and a self-styled tough guy, not to mention a victim of political violence rather than the chief advocate of it. I dunno what Thomas Matthew Crooks’ real motive was, but I know he gave Trump one of the biggest boosts imaginable.

Thanks, guy.

And a direct aspect of that boost was that instantly iconic snapshot.  

Thanks to that Iwo Jima-like photograph by future Pulitzer Prize winner Evan Nucci of the Associate Press, the chances of Trump winning in November—already on the rise—just went up appreciably, again. The emotional power of that event, and of that image specifically, is overwhelming reason, which was already on life support in America. It’s also overwhelming the collective memory of the nightmarish Trump years, from the kidnapping of children as a matter of deliberate and barbaric state policy, to wanton corruption, to bootlicking servility to Vladimir Putin, to the borderline genocide of a botched response to the pandemic, to January 6^th. Not to mention the fact that the Trump party is now openly promising as an encore a white nationalist theocracy where women will be chattel, the poor will be punished, the military will establish concentration camps, the DOJ will go after Don’s enemies, and Trump and his friends will rob the country blind.

As John Heilemann writes in Puck:

In Milwaukee this week, a Republican Party that already saw Donald Trump as a righteous victim even before he dodged an assassin’s bullet will hail him as more than a martyr: as a bona fide hero, a literally bloodied warrior, maybe even a messiah. But many Democrats fear that Trump’s brush with death will make him something else: a landslide winner in November.

IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND, LAMBCHOP

As usual, the press is serving as Trump’s useful idiots on this matter. Two days after the shooting, the Washington Post’s headline writers again covered themselves in glory—sorry, strike that; I meant dogshit—with a headline reading, “Trump Says to ‘Stand United’ as FBI Seeks Motive in Assassination Attempt.”

Soon after the shooting Trump had released a statement on Truth Social that it was immediately clear had been ghosted for him, as it began with thanks to someone other than himself (the Secret Service) and expressed sorrow for the dead and wounded—two things never associated with Donald Trump—and contained nothing in all caps, and no use of the words “haters,” “losers” or anyone being “sick” or “demented.” But I do believe he wrote the subsequent post saying it was God who diverted the bullets away from him. His supporters seem to agree. So God must really have hated Corey Comperatore, the retired fire chief that one of those bullets hit and killed. Unless—stay with me here—that’s not how it works? Comperatore v. Trump is Exhibit A in the Ain’t No Such Thing as Karma debate.

Melania subsequently issued a statement of her own—rare for her—which read like it was written by an AI that spoke only Slovenian, then translated into Esperanto, then back into Slovenian, then into English. And it was batshit crazy in any language. Melania wrote: “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music and inspiration.”

AYFKM? I’ll look for Don at the next Haim show.

Speaking of the press, one thing unremarked upon in the post-shooting video of Trump being hustled into an armored SUV was the number of rallygoers who turned to the camera and gave it the finger, clearly seen angrily shouting “Fuck you!” Hey, I frequently criticize the media myself (I just did it—see above), but these guys are in a different league. The level of vitriol is at Nuremburg levels.

Think about it. These people, who were eyewitnesses to a historic assassination attempt on a former US president and current presidential candidate—their hero—stopped watching it unfold as it happened so they could yell obscenities at the press. Yikes.

It also must be said that it’s not yet clear whether Trump’s ear injury was really from being grazed by a 5.56mm round of ball ammo, or from broken glass from a shattered teleprompter. (Remember on the campaign trail in 2016 when Trump said, “I always wanted to get a Purple Heart.”) What’s the rule? Don’t post stuff until you know if it’s true? Well, I’d like to comply, but since the other side likes to get control of the narrative from the jump irrespective of what facts later emerge, I’d be a damn fool to do any different, as Yossarian says in Catch-22. It may well prove to be the case that he was in fact clipped by a round; the doctors have yet to issue a statement. But just putting this out there until the jury is in. (So to speak.)

People are also saying Trump shat his pants after he dropped to his knees during the shooting—that’s why the Secret Service took so long to move him. I dunno if it’s true, but people are talking about it, amirite? Just seems like something that is being discussed. Like I say, I dunno—just passing it along.

Lastly, before we move off the shooting, indulge me in a little military detour.

That Crooks had a clean line of sight from less than 150 meters away—a middling target on a rifle range that any average infantryman with an AR-15 should be able to hit—is a separate scandal that the Secret Service will have to answer for. This was not Oswald hitting a moving target with an old bolt action Italian rifle, getting off three rounds in six seconds. This gunman should never have had a clean shot at Trump in the first place. The USSS’s sharpshooters did a fine job once the threat was identified, but they should never have had to pull their triggers at all. And while “countersniper” is a justified term for those fine Secret Service marksmen, I would reject the term “sniper” for Crooks or any other madman who decides to open fire on his fellow Americans. In my day as a tactical intel officer for a parachute infantry regiment, we had the unit’s sniper teams under our operational control (not for assassination, as popular lore would have you believe, but because snipers are a valuable intelligence-collection resource), and conducted a portion of their training, though I am not and never was a sniper myself. In my view, that term is reserved for calm, cool, well-disciplined military professionals. So please refrain from honoring this would-be killer with that title. 

REICHSTAG IN ALLEGHENY

It ought to go without saying that the attempt on Trump’s life was another shocking demonstration of the precarious state of the nation. But we are a violent country and always have been.

My friend Jim Moseley forwarded me a message from his grad school mentor, Rich Megraw, a retired professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, who wrote:

Consider this alone: We’ve had, to date, 45 presidents (46 minus Cleveland twice).  Of that number, we’ve killed four (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy). But someone tried to shoot Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts. (The shot at FDR killed the mayor of Miami.) Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot Harry Truman when he was out walking, Squeaky Fromme squeezed one off at Gerald Ford, and John Hinkley tried to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.  Those are just ones we know about.

That’s an attempt, four of them successful, on 10 out of 45 presidents—nearly one-quarter the total.

That said, hold onto your hat. It’s only going to get worse. 

I would add that Squeaky was joined by Sarah Jane Moore, who took a shot at Ford that same month (and also missed). And that list does not include mere presidential candidates, like George Wallace, paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in 1972, or as Prof. Megraw notes, the likely many many attempts that were thwarted by the Secret Service and others that we never heard about.

So will this assassination attempt be Trump‘s Reichstag fire? I won’t go so far as to claim it was a false flag operation like that one. It wasn’t. But it functioned that way, and will provide Trump the exact same benefits. It’s even better, in fact, since it was a legitimate act of violence against him, even if committed by a politically confused loner and (I say again) a registered Republican, not a left wing hater as the right would have us believe.

But even before it was announced that he was Trump’s pick to be his running mate, J.D. Vance wasted no time in blaming Biden and the Democrats for the assassination attempt, on the grounds that they have painted Trump as an existential threat to democracy. (Republican Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia went further, calling for the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to arrest and charge President Biden.) But that Trump is a threat is a demonstrable fact, and in no way equivalent to a call for vigilantism. Maybe J.D. is projecting, based on how his own party operates.

It ought to go without saying that this is an absurd, cynical, totally dishonest claim. (I said it came out of the facehole of J.D. Vance, didn’t I?) But it was utterly predictable, even inevitable, coming from the Republican Party—and Vance and Collins were not alone. As the Washington Post reported, “Many supporters of Trump, both rank-and-file voters and elected officials, quickly took to social media to argue that the rhetoric of Biden and his supporters—casting Trump as a threat to democracy—led to Saturday’s events.” So the GOP is now, er, weaponzing the event as an excuse to put off limits any criticism of Trump, hysterically and dishonestly claiming that it promotes violence. “Political violence in all forms is unamerican and unacceptable,” tweeted Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), a proponent of the Big Lie and defender of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

That is gaslighting at its finest.

We don’t yet know all the facts or much of anything about the would-be assassin, but he appears to have been a classic, Travis Bickle-like deranged lone wolf, a 20 year old kid who’d been bullied, who’d never even voted in a presidential election, and now never will. What he was pointedly NOT was a left wing devotee of MSNBC, driven to attempted murder by Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow.

TRUMPNESIA

The brilliant essayist A.R. Moxon writes that there is indeed an active political movement “which is fully dedicated to forcing us to all live in a world of easy massacres and accelerating normalized political violence. It’s our political violence party, and I’m told it is leading in the polls right now.”

In the wake of Saturday’s shooting, Moxon gave one of the most scorching assessments of this Republican hypocrisy, writing of the daily trauma of living in what he calls a bully’s paradise:

Well I’m given to understand that today and for an extremely limited time, the members of our nation’s political violence party are shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of easy massacres and normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.

I’m kidding, of course. They’ve already decided who is to blame. It’s the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.

The GOP is a party whose leaders include folks like Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who in a rant against liberals, recently told a church audience (a church audience!) that “some people just need killing.” It’s a party whose leading “think tank,” the Heritage Foundation, recently called for a second American Revolution, as Moxon writes, “to be waged by MAGA America against all the rest of us, which we were assured would stay bloodless as long as we didn’t resist.”

(W)e’ve all seen the little threats and little hopes for retributive violence, peeking out at us around any turned corner, thin blue line flags and Punisher logos and violence-celebrating car wraps and bumper stickers and “Rope. Journalist. Tree. Some Assembly Required.” t-shirts, marring a bright sunshiny day with the sudden knowledge that we share this beautiful world with people who are comforted by the idea of a coming day when they may be able to see a lot of us die, and would like us to understand that the threat they pose is real and ever-present…..and just last month the tempo of the drumbeat was massively increased when the MAGA supreme court attached a bump stock—a modification MAGA America demands as a crucial element of what they call freedom, which expresses itself as their right to kill whoever they want whenever they see fit.

But I think it’s all going to be a bit too much to take if we’re also to be blamed by the bullies who made this world for us….if these fascists, realizing that they too have to live in this world they’ve created, decide that the people to blame for this is everybody except for themselves, and that this now justifies even more violence against the rest of us.

We are in a moment drenched in irony. As Republicans clutch their pearls and fall back on their fainting couches demanding civility, let us remember that Trump publicly ridiculed Paul Pelosi, an 80 year old man, when he was beaten in the head with a hammer by a crazed right wing assailant. Many of his followers, including Don Jr. followed suit.

Let us likewise remember that he has threatened a “bloodbath” if he does not win in November.

Or that he suggested “Second Amendment people” could dispense with Hillary Clinton.

Or that he has called for the execution of government officials who leaked internal administration secrets.

Or that he told his private army of thugs to “stand back and stand by“

Or that he encouraged cops not to be “so nice” when manhandling detainees.

Or that he has proposed that thieves be shot on sight.

Or that he repeatedly called for using the US military to suppress domestic dissent, asking why they can’t just shoot protestors in the legs?

Or that he is on record calling his enemies “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of the country,” (and you know what we do with vermin, right?), promising “I am your retribution.” (To a crowd in Waco, TX no less.)

Or that he summoned a mob to murder his own vice president and various members of Congress by way of overturning an election so he could stay in power?

There is simply no analogue among the leadership of the left, not by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how much the GOP wants to gaslight us that there is, and the civilized and humane response of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to Saturday’s events prove it, yet again. So spare me, J.D. Vance.

But now that someone’s taken a shot at Donald, the Republican Party is whining at top volume, and trying to exploit the moment, as it always does. Moxon again:

The people in the political movement that openly calls for civil war have this in common with the rest of us: They apparently have a real problem with actual shots actually fired—although for them that opposition appears confined exclusively to cases where they feel they might be the target. Bullies hate to bleed their own blood.

CAPITOL HILLBILLY

I’m not even including Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate as part of this litany of recent horrors, because I don’t necessarily think that’s a plus for the GOP. Apart from buttoning up Ohio, which is already pretty damned red, what does he bring to the ticket? Does anyone except the already Kool-Aid-drunk MAGA faithful like him? I may be biased, but seems to me that a lot of Americans find him repulsive. But I am glum mainly that, for at least the next four months, at a minimum, we will have to deal with this cretin, who makes Ted Cruz look good, which I didn’t think was possible.

To that end, the main takeaway from Vance’s selection is that Trump is doubling down by picking a Mini-Me, which is a sign of how he and his party care not a whit for old school Republicans or “moderates,” and how they intend to govern if they win. As if Project 2025 left any doubt.

Dear Lincoln Project, DNC, and pro-democracy Super PACs: Please run ads 24/7 reminding us how Vance has previously called Trump unfit for the White House, the equivalent of heroin, a “cynical asshole” (physician, heal thyself) and an “American Hitler.” But for Trump, I think that’s a plus. As with Rubio and Cruz and Lady G and so many others, it’s the sadism of making former critics grovel and kiss his ring that he loves, even more than he loves the true believers who have always been by his side.

I am, however, a little surprised Vance got the nod after reading how much Trump hates facial hair. So the question is, will J.D. have to shave? And if so, how much of Trump’s semen will be in those whiskers as he shears them off?  Unless it’s Peter Thiel’s. Might need to do a DNA test.

Like Vance, I don’t have the brainspace right now to get into Cannon dismissing what is nonchalantly called “the documents case,” but is better described as the theft and withholding of nuclear secrets. Could there be a more serious crime? Only trying to overturn a free and fair election by force, I suppose, another thing the right wing judiciary seems determined to let Trump get away with. To that end, I couldn’t listen to much of the analysis of Cannon’s decision, and the alleged silver lining of potential legal avenues going forward. It’s all moot if Trump wins. For now, the point is that Cannon has now allowed him to (falsely) claim exoneration on this matter, which enhances the chances of that win.

But it’s clear that the GOP is no longer even pretending to abide by the rule of law, so certain is it of its control of the judiciary such that it can justify anything he does, and of victory in November which will solidify it, and of its chance to establish a right wing dictatorship. After all, that photo of Trump was so freaking cool, right????

Such is the level of political discourse and sophistication in this once proud country.  I’m almost afraid to wake up in the morning and see what tomorrow holds.

But I don’t want to end on a defeatist note, because they don’t call it “defeatism” for nothing. Team Trump would love for us to give up and accept his coronation as a fait accompli. Let’s make like the angry crowd at the Butler, PA rally and respond with a collective middle finger. Perhaps this shocking stretch over the past few weeks will wake some of our heretofore somnolent countrymen and women up to just how close we are to a second Trump presidency—which is to say, to the ascent of the first ever truly fascist regime in these United States.

There is still time to avert that—if we have the stomach.

********

Photo: Trump cowering beneath Secret Service agents after suffering a minor flesh wound.

Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images