Warning Shot

Just as an assassin's bullet barely missed killing Donald Trump, will we miss the opportunity to tone down the political rhetoric and agree to disagree without hateful rancor?

BUTLER COUNTY, PA — Did the 20 year old gunman who came within an inch of assassinating former President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally outside of Pittsburgh on Saturday also come dangerously close to throwing an already chaotic and divisive election—and possibly the nation itself—into even deeper division? So far politicians from both parties are mostly saying the right things, mostly—tone down the rhetoric, come together, etc…we’ll see if that sticks. I’m not optimistic.

Both presumptive nominees are divisive—even within their own parties. Biden is barely hanging on to the Democratic nomination after a disastrous debate performance and a week of not-so-reassuring public appearances, including a meandering press conference last week that did little to calm concerns that he’s not up to the job of being president. Trump had been his usual toxic force, at least until his campaign rally was cut short by the assassination attempt.

In a prime-time address to the nation on Sunday evening, President Biden, speaking to a nation traumatized by political violence, called for “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics,” and “to take a step back, take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here.”

But at a campaign rally just two days earlier, Biden delivered “a fiery and energetic speech in battleground Michigan that painted his Republican rival as a convict, a rapist and a cheater while simultaneously attacking the news media for an insufficient focus on such misdeeds.” During a call with donors earlier in the week Biden said “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye,” recently referred to Trump as a would-be “dictator,” has compared him to Adolf Hitler, described him as an “existential” threat to democracy, and likened the election as a battle between good and evil.

Trump frequently refers to Biden as “crooked Joe,” and only minutes before an assassin’s bullets killed a young father, injured two others, and narrowly missed the former president’s head, told the crowd that “our country is going to hell,” as “millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and mental institutions,” remarked that “our country has been stolen from us,” and repeated his claims that the 2020 election had been “rigged.”

“Gone are the soapbox saws about ‘our children’s future; and ‘the most important election of our lifetime’ that punctuated U.S. elections for decades,” Washington Post reporters Michael Scherer, Hannah Allam and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, wrote. “In their place have been dire warnings of doom should the other side prevail.”

Striking a similar worried tone, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board warned that “leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.”

We like to romanticize the past, but politics has always been a nasty business—by its very nature divisive—pitting one side against another. These days you’re either a Republican or Democrat, Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, MAGA or Woke. “You’re fer us, or ‘agin us.” There’s no middle ground.

Unfortunately, ad hominin attacks, exaggerations, outright lies, are business as usual in political campaigning—always have been. Those vying for political power seek to disparage, mock and embarrass their political opponents—and have egged on their supporters to do the same. Even George Washington was criticized for being “monarchical,” one of the worst slurs of the day and akin to being called anti-democratic. During the election of 1800, Jefferson was called a “Francophile” (traitor and threat to democracy), while John Adams’ political opponents labeled him an “Anglophile” (also traitor and threat to democracy), and worried aloud that he was intent on creating a ruling family dynasty at the expense of the new Constitution. James Engell, a professor of English at Harvard University called that election a “cesspool of personal attacks.” And you can just imagine the names that Abraham Lincoln was called by his opponents and the pro-slavery press when he ran for President in 1860.

Why do so many aspirants to political office resort to personal attacks and negative campaigning? They believe it works. “Negativity has been increasing over the past decade, so much so that negativity is now the dominant form of advertising in elections,” wrote political scientists Erika Fowler, Michael Franz, and Travis Ridout, in their classic “Political Advertising in the United States.” According to UC Davis psychology professor Alison Ledgerwood, negative campaigning is “stickier.” Our brains, according to Ledgerwood, are hard-wired to seek out and remember negative information.

Fear is a powerful motivator of people. And politicians, media companies, social media influencers, have become ever more adept at stoking it. “Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship,” writes New York Times contributing Opinion writer Elizabeth Spiers. “Voters say they want Americans to be unified, but Republicans mean they want everyone to be a Republican, and Democrats want everyone to be a Democrat.”

So far, most of our political leadership are saying the right things—but truces in the name of political expediency are not ceasefires—and only three days later you can already see backtracking. “President Biden spoke to the country from his weekend home in Delaware, as he should have done, and he properly denounced ‘political violence.’ So did leaders of both political parties,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial on Monday, “But the statements will amount to little if they aren’t followed with a change in behavior and rhetoric.”

Both Biden and Trump constantly speak of “unity” and “uniting,” though both have struggled to unite even their own parties, and paid mostly lip-service to reaching out to the other side. “In this moment,” implores the Washington Post, “we have to recognize that we have all been touched by toxic politics—regardless of our beliefs or where we fall on an ideological spectrum.”

On Thursday Trump will be accepting the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in Milwaukee. He has said that he would be revising his acceptance speech to emphasize national unity. "This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together," Trump told the Washington Examiner. "The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would've been two days ago." It was reported that he had asked Republican convention speakers to tone down their rhetoric as well. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, during another meandering interview Monday evening (read it for yourself), this time with NBC’s Lester Holt, President Biden already appeared to be stepping back from some of the kumbaya comments he made during his national address Sunday evening about calming the rhetoric and lowering the political temperature.

Holt asked the President if he had “taken a step back and done a little soul searching”—referring to language the President may have used prior to the assassination attempt—that some might interpret as inciteful. “How do you talk about the threat to democracy,” Biden replied, “which is real, when a president [Trump] says things like he says? Do you just not say anything ’cause it may incite somebody? Look, I — I — I — I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my — my — my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric.” To which Holt responded, “This doesn’t sound like you’re — you’re — you’re turning down the heat, though.”

See why I’m not optimistic?

Trump’s speech at the convention on Thursday might not only be a turning point in the election, it might be a turning point for America, at least for American politics. “And so the speech he’s going to give at the convention may well be one of the most watched convention speeches, certainly in the modern era,” New York Times columnist David French said during his podcast. “And so he’s going to have an opportunity not just to speak to the Republican Party, which is fully his. He’s going to have a moment when even independents, and maybe even a few Democrats, are going to approach him with the most sympathetic outlook that he’s going to have since 2016.”

“What we’ve seen for a long time is, for example, with Donald Trump, we’ve seen him set the cultural river in the GOP in a direction towards greater confrontation, greater animosity, greater pugilism,” continued French, “And one of the interesting things is going to be, does he shift the current of the river? And again, we’ve seen preliminary reporting that he is, in fact, really reflective on what occurred.”

So will the current shift? Or will we be swept away in the constant flood of violent and recriminatory rhetoric? One clue to the—hopeful—direction that former President Trump might take is the invitation to Nikki Haley, Trump’s Republican primary opponent, to speak at the convention. It was widely reported that before Saturday Haley had not been offered an opportunity to address the convention. During the primaries, Haley had called Trump—among many other things— “unhinged,” and said that America couldn’t stand “four years of chaos, vendettas and drama.” After the assassination attempt Haley and Trump spoke, and Trump invited Haley to speak at the convention. A welcome sign.

Perhaps the attempted assassination of Donald Trump will serve as a warning shot—that it’s time to tone down the apoplectic and apocalyptic rhetoric. Disagree? Certainly. Stridently disagree? Of course. Demonize? No. “Mr. Trump has the opportunity to rein in some of the worst rhetorical impulses of the Republican Party at its convention this week,” writes Chris Christie in a New York Times Guest Essay, “He can point the party and its leadership in a new direction in the wake of the assassination attempt against him.” I’m hoping so.