Let's not learn the wrong lesson from yesterday's attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. The biggest problem facing our country isn't toxic political discourse. It is Donald Trump.
To believe otherwise is to deny some evident facts. That's why I disagree with the basic premise of Biden's speech to the nation today.
President Joe Biden used a rare Oval Office address on Sunday to condemn political violence and plead with Americans to turn down the temperature in the increasingly toxic political system after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
...Speaking from the Resolute Desk, Biden decried that the political rhetoric has gotten “very heated” and urged Americans to “cool it down.” He said disagreements in a democratic system were inevitable, but politics should be an “arena for peaceful debate,” and not a “killing field.”
Biden, along with many other politicians, both Democratic and Republican, are wrongly assuming that the motivation of the 20 year old man who tried to kill Trump (and did kill a member of the rally audience) was political.
There's no evidence of this. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican. He made a small donation to a Democratic-leaning group. He clearly wasn't a political zealot. A CNN story says:
So far, investigators haven’t found any evidence on social media or other writings by Crooks that might help identify his motive for the attempted assassination, law enforcement officials say.
But CNN interviews with more than a half-dozen former classmates and neighbors of Crooks painted him as quiet, with classmates remembering him as a good student and something of a misfit in high school. And a review of public records suggests he may have had divergent political leanings, with Crooks registering to vote as a Republican but making a small donation to a Democratic-leaning group.
Since Crooks was killed by the Secret Service, there's no way to know what led him to take an AR-15 rifle to a rooftop near the Trump rally location and fire shots at Trump, narrowly missing him aside from his ear, but hitting several other people in the audience.
So at the moment it is irresponsible to blame the shooting on toxic political discourse, since there's zero evidence this spurred Crooks to do what he did. There's a much greater chance that even though he showed no sign of mental illness, he struggled with some "demons" that were kept hidden from other people and eventually led him to attempt to kill Trump.
As others have noted, the man who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, John Hinckley, Jr., apparently was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster with his moment of fame and didn't have anything against Reagan.
Similarly, Crooks, who lived nearby, may have used the Trump rally to act out his own desire -- which unfortunately will always remain a matter of conjecture.
The parade of Republicans who I've heard decrying the vicious attacks on Trump's character and political positions fail to understand the simple reason for this: Trump has a nasty character and dangerous political positions.
Trump has lied, cheated, and stolen his way through life. It's difficult to think of anything admirable about Trump. The best I can come up with is that Trump is remarkably consistent: he always puts himself first, not his family, not his associates, not his country.
There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump.
Trump never tires of attacking people who fail to kiss his ass with sufficient enthusiasm. In his first term he caused hundreds of thousands of needless Covid deaths by failing to endorse public health measures that would have saved those lives. His legal problems stem from him doing illegal things. He had sex with a porn star a few months after his wife gave birth to their son Barron, then tried to cover that up shortly before the 2016 election in a fashion that earned him 34 felony convictions. He encouraged the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol and did nothing to stop it.
This just scratches the surface of all the crap Trump has dumped upon our country in his boundless enthusiasm for destroying all that is admirable about our democracy. Republican politicians don't like it when us Democrats call Trump an existential threat to democracy.
But that's the truth, and it needs to be spoken even more loudly after the assassination attempt, because this likely will garner Trump some sympathy points in upcoming polls.
Regarding the Republican convention next week, I suppose if all of the speeches, including the one from Trump himself, are totally respectful toward Biden and other Democrats, focusing only on policy positions regarding immigration, taxes, climate change, foreign policy, and such that the two parties disagree on, then I'll be totally surprised, and possibly even open to changing my highly negative attitude toward Trump and his GOP supporters.
The chance of that happening is extremely slim, though. Hopefully the Biden campaign won't hold back after a few days of post-assassination-attempt halting of campaign activities. It's vitally important that the S.O.B. called Donald Trump be defeated this November. Democrats shouldn't worry about attacking him strongly with words.
It's attacking people physically that's the problem. Something that Trump has encouraged his followers to do, as I well recall from how he acted in 2016. Thus Trump has contributed more than anyone else to the climate of making political violence acceptable.
He's a despicable human being and needs to be shown the trash can of history in the upcoming election.
Whatever Crook's motivations, you're the one condoning violence.
Posted by: sant64 | July 15, 2024 at 01:22 PM