MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump's biggest skill — perhaps his only real skill — is mugging for a camera. His first instinct, upon being nicked by a would-be assassin's bullet, was not to run for safety and certainly not to worry about those in the audience who were seriously injured or killed. No, it was to maximize the photo opp, raising his fist in a reality TV-style imitation of "defiance," as blood streaked through his make-up. The pictures sent a shockwave of fear and dread through the coalition of democracy defenders. Trump is already the cult leader of an increasingly fascist movement. The concern is that the attempt on his life will propel him to new levels of messianic power over his slavish followers.
Trump is leaning into this with all the subtlety of a pro wrestler. In a video that leaked Tuesday, Trump is heard on speakerphone talking to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about his injury, which he described as like being bitten by "the world’s largest mosquito." But when Trump showed up at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday night, he was sporting a comically oversized bandage on his ear. The crowd responded by chanting, "Fight, fight, fight!"
Here in Milwaukee, Republicans are riled up by the shooting. But they don't seem especially bothered about almost losing their leader. Democratic voters are the ones who are fretting, both from fear of backlash and an opposition to political violence that Republicans do not share. Republicans at the convention, on the other hand, aren't worried about violence at all. Trump nearly getting killed is making the crowd inside Fiserv Forum palpably giddy. Watching Eric Trump speak about the attack Monday night was startling, as he seemed more stoked to rev up the crowd than upset over the violence inflicted on his father.
The reaction from Republican politicians and pundits has been an unnerving competition of who can lavish Trump with the most praise for having the sheer luck that the bullet mostly missed him. (A man died during the attack, but following Trump's lead, most of the GOP leaders barely noticed until Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the final speakers on Tuesday, made a mention.) Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, won that silly contest by tweeting, "Courageous, United, and Defiant," earning the reward of being the next right-hand man Trump will soon pressure to commit felonies. This behavior is insincere, rooted not in any real affection for Trump, so much as in an understanding that hyperbolic flattery is the best way to pry favors from a narcissist. For everyday Republicans who will likely never meet Trump beyond shaking hands at a photo line, the focus was on how this shooting bolsters their hopes for a MAGA victory in November.
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The Salon team spoke with Michele Morrow, a home school advocate nominated by Republicans for North Carolina's state superintendent, on Monday at the convention. Her response captured the mood. "President Trump is going to win victoriously," she gushed. "He has actually put his life, his fortune and his sacred honor on the line for 'We the People.'" She predicted that, riding high on being shot, Trump would make America "that city on a hill for the rest of the world."
No doubt, the biggest prize is a chance to muddy the waters, when it comes to who is responsible for the rising tide of political violence in the U.S. today. As Alex Shephard wrote in the New Republic, the objective answer is not mysterious:
The man who was wounded on Saturday has spent his entire political career openly encouraging violence, including an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has mused about “Second Amendment people,” defended murderous neo-Nazis, encouraged police to shoot protesters, and spoken to a violent, right-wing group as if they were his private army. He has tried to overturn one lawful, wholly legitimate election and has suggested he will do it again, should he lose in November. He is campaigning on radically transforming the federal government, replacing thousands of employees with loyalists, and contorting it into his own authoritarian image. He has promised to “root out” his enemies who “live like vermin” and must be exterminated for the country to survive. In nearly every public statement there is contempt for democracy, decency, and pluralism.
Nor is there any real reason to believe that the shooter was motivated by politics. Much has been made of the killer giving $15 to a faux-progressive scam when he was still 17 years old, but his family's MAGA yard signs and recent Republican voter registration suggest his political sympathies leaned rightward. As Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money wrote, "It seems quite likely now that Thomas Crooks had no strong ideological motivation." His profile suggests a misfit looking for glory, in the mode of John Hinckley or Lee Harvey Oswald, not someone with coherent political goals.
People on the ground at the RNC are eager to use this shooting to deflect the entirely correct accusation that Republicans, by nominating the man who incited the January 6 insurrection, are the ones endorsing political violence. Instead, they used the shooting to level false accusations at President Joe Biden's administration. One delegate from North Carolina claimed, "We don't really have a lot of trust in the agencies that are going to be doing an investigation." She hoped for a private investigation because "there's a lot of questions" about "the FBI and who they really work for."
When I pointed out that Biden had given an Oval Office address calling on people to resolve political differences "at the ballot box" and "not with bullets," she responded by saying, "I just don't feel like he means them. I feel like it's just all talk."
Tara Jenner, a candidate for state committeewoman in Florida, also took a conspiratorial tone. "It's not who shoots the bullet, who pays for it's the one that counts," she told Salon. "That's the key you need to look at to see where that's coming from."
When I jokingly asked if she was worried that someone at the convention would not vote for Trump, she replied, "Not if they want to live." Her companion swiftly jumped in to say, "That's not a threat," and she replied, "Well, they might get bruised..." Jenner later said her comment "was hyperbole and kind of tongue in cheek."
"We don't want to exacerbate things."
One delegate from North Dakota complained about "a media narrative that people on the right are evil, people on the right are misogynistic, evil, homophobes, whatever. And it's absurd, of course, because this is the party of Lincoln."
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"What else would you expect to happen when you have an administration who is calling people on the other side 'MAGA extremists' that want to harm you, that are wanting to end democracy?" he added.
Even though Salon never asked folks about gun control, many Republicans brought it up, worried that this incident might besmirch their support for even more gun deregulation. One delegate from Florida summed up the view as, "We don't have a gun problem in this country. You have a mental health problem." Tellingly, people tended to get more animated when defending the honor of guns than they did when expressing pro forma statements wishing Trump well. One gets the impression that, even if he'd been hurt more badly, they'd still be more worried about guns than about their leader's health.
Trump doesn't mean much on a human level to his supporters. He's a vehicle for what truly animates MAGA: their sense of grievance. As Paul Waldman wrote after the shooting in The Cross Section, Trump rallies have "a sustained bass note of menace and potential violence waiting to be unleashed." That feeling of barely suppressed rage comes to the surface often when speaking to Trump supporters, especially when they're talking about their sense of victimization at the hands of the liberals they imagine are sneering at their politically incorrect ways. As Waldman notes, the real heat flows when Trump waxes poetic about January 6 "hostages" or turns the crowd's ire towards the press, whom he calls "the worst people in the world." They don't love him so much as they hate other Americans who aren't like them.
That's why their response to Trump playing up his minor injury with a diaper-sized bandage was not to commiserate with his pain. Instead, the crowd chanted, "Fight, fight, fight!"
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