The Shadow of a Gunman

If we want to get out from under it, we have to depersonalize our political conflicts

This is not how it went down this past weekend

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My thoughts, like Damon Linker’s, remain quite unsettled in the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Trump. So forgive me if this piece comes off as even more stream-of-consciousness than my pieces tend to be.

I’ll start on a very personal note, at the risk of acutely embarrassing myself. I had, when younger, a persistent waking fantasy of being shot at by a hidden gunman. In the most elaborate version of this fantasy, I was an important person of some sort—such as a candidate for the presidency—and single-handedly disarmed and apprehended the would-be assassin. But the fantasy wasn’t always so elaborate; sometimes I was just an author on a book tour, and the shooter was apprehended or killed by police. I always survived, though, and I always emerged triumphant and more confident from the experience of being shot at.

I don’t know what that fantasy says about me. I think it has something to do with the scope of my desire for success and prominence in my youth and my anxieties about whether I had to fortitude to achieve those things. Sometimes I think I was trying to tell myself that I was strong enough, and that the threats that would inevitably come my way would make me stronger. Other times I think the opposite, that the fantasy was about leap-frogging over those obstacles, the gunman a kind of deus ex-machina who would make the slog of hard work unnecessary. Maybe it was a fantasy of expiation; I’ve always carried a burden of guilt, from before I was old enough to have done much of anything wrong, and perhaps the bullet I dodged—or was hit with; in some versions I was wounded—was fired by an avenging angel, and my survival a divine mercy. The commonality, though, is that it was a fantasy, not a nightmare. Some part of me not only didn’t dread it but wished for this absurd scenario to come about.

MAGA world, if not Trump himself, is living through a version of that fantasy right now. The instantly-iconic image of Trump with his face bloodied, raising his fist in defiance, tells the story perfectly. “They” had to resort to violence to try to stop us, and they failed. Our hero who embodies all our hopes survived, and now we are unstoppable. No amount of clucking and tut-tutting will stop Trump supporters from saying and believing some version of that, because it is a genuine emotional reaction. Cynical politicians may merely be echoing that sentiment rather than feeling it themselves, but that’s what cynical politicians do. And as they do, we risk a widening gyre of rage and fear that could have catastrophic civic consequences regardless of the election’s outcome.

What is a healing answer that has a chance of bringing our polity back to sanity? I can’t know, of course. But I have a firm idea of what will make things worse, and a more tentative idea about what just might make things better.

If you want to make things worse, take your cue from Senator J. D. Vance or columnist David Frum. Vance says that Trump’s assassin was motivated by Democratic propaganda about Trump being a threat to democracy, implicitly justifying violence as a last resort to prevent catastrophe. Frum says that Trump’s assassin was motivated by the climate of violence that Trump himself created by his rhetoric. Both are effectively echoing Malcolm X’s statement about the Kennedy assassination that the chickens have come home to roost. They just disagree about which political party is solely responsible for the chickens.

We don’t yet know what motivated the would-be assassin, but what little we know suggests that he’s either a random lunatic, like John Hinckley (who plotted to shoot Carter before successfully shooting Reagan, all to impress Jodie Foster), or someone with idiosyncratic beliefs like Francisco Duran (who fired 29 rounds at the Clinton White House before being subdued, and who was motivated by generalized anti-government animus). There’s plenty of investigation to be done about what went wrong on Saturday, but I don’t think it’s helpful to blame a general climate—whether of violent movies or of violent political rhetoric or what-have-you—for these kinds of actions. You just condemn the actions.

Which is precisely what most Democrats and non-partisan observers are doing, intoning some version of “this is not who we are.” But of course this is very much who we are; every president since Franklin Roosevelt, with the exception of Dwight Eisenhower, has faced at least one assassination attempt. It’s practically an American pastime. And while I think those abhorring the violence are entirely sincere, I also think a lot of Trump opponents have been walking around with yet another violent fantasy in their heads, a Dead Zone-style fantasy of direct action by one brave individual that dramatically ends the Trump threat without technically leaving blood on the fantasist’s hands. In other words, while I don’t think that Democrats bear any blame for creating a “climate” in which assassination seems sensible, I do think they’ve been doing themselves a lot of damage by cultivating a mentality which, logically, ends in violence as a last resort.

So I think, if we want to heal, we have to undermine both fantasies. Both fantasies are highly personal, a singular hero facing a singular villain, with America in the balance. It’s that singularity, that sense of history hanging on a hinge in the way a single human life can, that we need to turn away from.

The resort to violence is on one level profoundly offensive to small-r republican sensibilities. Ballots, not bullets, are supposed to decide political outcomes. But in another sense, there’s something profoundly small-r republican about insouciance about such violence. That’s the point of the famous bit in Unforgiven where English Bob asks “why not shoot a president?” when a president is ultimately just another citizen, not someone of a higher order like a king.

The reason English Bob can say this, though, is not only that in his mind violence is natural (he’s an outlaw gunslinger, after all), but also because the identity of the president doesn’t really matter all that much. And I think if we’re going to try to heal this civic breach, both parties need to start saying things that reaffirm that half-truth (because of course sometimes the president’s identity matters a great deal), and say that if the assassin was trying to change history, his bullets would have been badly insufficient.

If I were advising Donald Trump, I would have him say the kinds of unifying things that most observers are hoping he will say. But I would also have him say something like the following: This guy who tried to kill me, I don’t know if he was just some nut job or what. But if he was trying to stop the Make America Great Again movement by killing me, I gotta say, he was even more out of his mind than people thought. Because the people who are going to make American great again are all of you. You’re the ones who are going to take back the country, and you’re going to do it whether I’m here or not.

And if I were advising President Biden, in addition to talking about how abhorrent political violence is, I would have him say something like the following: I wish Donald Trump a speedy and complete recovery and lives to a ripe old age—in private retirement. Yes, I believe a second Trump term would be a singular disaster for America. But I also believe that America is much bigger and much stronger than a single disastrous presidency. America is bigger and stronger than Donald Trump, and we don’t have to betray who we are to beat him, we need to remember who we are. And we need to remember it if, God-forbid, he wins, too, because America doesn’t belong to the president, whoever he is, it belongs to us.

I don’t think I’m suggesting either of them say anything that they couldn’t plausibly say, anything that betrays their core commitments or their campaigns. I’m just asking them to reaffirm a central tenet of small-r republican faith, that our political leaders—even at the highest level in the person of the president—represent us, they do not embody us. The president, unlike a king, has only one body, and it is a poor, bare, forked thing like each of our own. We shouldn’t shoot at him not because he is above us but because he is on our level; our quarrels are really with each other, and we shouldn’t settle our differences by shooting. But to the republic, he, like any of us, is dispensable.

The only thing hard about imagining either of these old men affirming such sentiments is that they have both built their political identities around their indispensability. But nothing would meet this fragile moment better than for both of them to back away from that arrogant fantasy, and start behaving like citizens of a republic.