Trump, Musk, Vance and America’s Violent Culture

Donald Trump was almost shot. Again.

This time he was one two-putt away from walking into range of another shooter at a manageable distance, and had a Secret Service agent not seen the barrel of a gun poking through the bushes one hole ahead of Trump, who knows what kind of world we’d be living in right now.

I spent all of today trying to write an original angle on it. I failed. What is there to even say anymore?

The immense power of guns and weapons manufacturers has ensured that history will remember America as the child killing country. We’re so steeped in gun violence that children are being shot and killed at rates not seen anywhere else in peer nations, and it’s largely met with a shoulder shrug from our political system.

How could this happen twice?

How could it not?

It’s all just so sad. Elon Musk is posting and deleting tweets that could be interpreted as calls for attempts on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s lives. Donald Trump is trying to connect two white registered Republican assassins to the border while JD Vance admits that he made up a blood libel about Haitian immigrants that Musk and Trump are boosting which is creating real danger to the residents of Springfield, Ohio.

Shots are fired. The temperature rises. Rinse. Repeat. Hell, I’m listening to Who Shot Ya as I write this. This is who we are. Everyone in America is touched by gun violence, as evidenced by the former President of the United States.

Twice.

Had Trump staged his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania a couple hours earlier back in July, he may not be here, as the wind picked up over the late afternoon. The press was all lined up to portray Trump as a changed man after nearly being killed, and while I torched them from a journalistic perspective for putting words in Trump’s mouth, the human angle to it is understandable. A life-threatening experience can be profoundly life changing.

But here we are, two assassination attempts later, still playing the same stupid games and earning increasingly dumber prizes. The victim of violence is encouraging it towards minority groups, creating a permission structure to escalate attacks on his life. We are all sitting on train tracks, in denial of what is behind the bright lights headed our way.

We don’t know what is next, as evidenced by these two attempts on Trump’s life within the same summer, and the fact that registered Republicans have tried to kill him demonstrate this issue is far more complex than our sclerotic and partisan political system is capable of comprehending. But what we do know is that we’re marinating in a toxic stew of resentment and myriad crises, all inflamed by a right-wing media ecosystem built by and for the billionaires determined to make mankind go extinct before the year 3000. Political violence is not new to America, and this year’s comparisons to 1968 are beginning to get extremely uncomfortable. America is a simmering, well-armed pot of rage. What’s next?