I am going to start this by saying that I don’t condone violence. Trump is hateful, he’s unhinged and divisive, and he’s dangerous. But I don’t condone violence.
A few housekeeping items. It appears the shooter was a single individual not within the perimeter. The Secret Service did require all those within the perimeter to go through a magnetometer. The reporting is that the shooter took an elevated position on top of a one story building outside the perimeter using a rifle capable of firing a bullet that traveled the distance from where he was to where Trump was.
The shooter has been killed, one attendee was also killed, and another attendee was injured. So even though a part of me really understands the impetus for people to believe that this was staged, it wasn’t.
Now onto what I really want to talk about. Even in tragedy, politics is politics and you never let a good crisis go to waste. The Biden team should take that to heart — perhaps not tonight, but soon. They can stand in solidarity with and have sympathy for Trump. But they can make a couple of key points in that discussion that are perfectly appropriate to raise.
First, it’s the far right and MAGA that have resisted the most common of common sense gun laws. What seems clear to me is that they never considered the idea that one of those guns would be used on them. I’m speculating, but given that most of the mass shooter incidences since Trump took office in 2016 have been from white males who associate themselves with MAGA specifically or at least loosely associate themselves with the hatred for anyone who is not straight and white, it’s like they believed this could never happen to them, and this event just underscores the need to revisit the assault weapons ban and finish the job and for MAGA Republicans to get out of the way.
Second thing is that when you use violent rhetoric, whether it’s thinly veiled or explicit (both of which Trump has used and which has been echoed by his acolytes), people hear it. It’s not just MAGA people that hear it, it’s all people who hear it. When you use that rhetoric, when you explicitly attack the Capitol, characterize this J6 attackers as “hostages” and “political prisoners” and implicitly call for violence in your rally speeches, when you dehumanize people who don’t share the politics that you hold, you can’t control who’s going to get that message. Whoever this shooter was, he heard. He responded. Again, I don’t condone it, but I’m not at all surprised that it happened. If anything, I’m surprised that it went so long without something like this happening.
Setting today aside, we are still in an election year. Everything is fair game, and I hope the Biden team really grabs their collective balls and find the rhetorical way to work these elements into the discussion while still expressing solidarity and sympathy. It’s not hard to do, hopefully they take advantage, because it already happened and we can’t make it not have happened. May as well use it to underscore the obvious, using Trump as a victim of his OWN policies and dangerous speech.
