OPINION: Until this summer, my wife’s family’s bach in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State has had woeful Wi-Fi, to put it mildly. It has, for years, been a hot-button issue, much like the lovely but lake-view-blocking birch tree in the front yard, as some are concerned a strong connection would keep people indoors, despite the panoply of outdoor natural wonders.
I was always pro-better Wi-Fi, but now regret my lobbying, for never have I longed to be farther out of touch than the other day when someone took a shot at Donald Trump. I found out the moment I returned from a typically gorgeous paddle to find everyone gathered in front of their devices, sifting through the mountains of misinformation in the vain hope that our insane national political climate hadn’t suffered yet another major storm.
The US has a long and shameful history of political assassination attempts, and I’ll skip over the irony that often those most opposed to gun control are the ones who have been shot at.
Two months before Ronald Reagan announced his first presidential run, his op-ed “Ronald Reagan: The Gun Owner’s Champion” appeared in the always fun-loving magazine Guns & Ammo, and Trump has called himself “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House”. The more salient point is that we now live in a society in a seemingly permanent state of chaos, where norms explode daily and concepts like truth, trust, civility and integrity are for suckers and losers – as Trump in 2018 reportedly called the 2000-plus US soldiers in a cemetery near Paris – and their antonyms carry no consequences, political or otherwise.
We live in bizarro world, where almost nothing is as it should be and expecting the merely outlandish is impossibly naive. For instance, now we have Democrats approaching Republican cowardice when it comes to not saying in public what they all say in private. Republicans have for years reviled Trump behind closed doors as they clambered over each other to smooch his buttocks in front of TV cameras, and now many Democrats are privately frantic in their longing for Biden to step aside lest he drag down the party and they lose their precious piece of the power pie, but few have the balls to say so publicly.
The next four months were going to be slow and painful, even if the political noise level stayed at ear-splitting, but this attempt on Trump’s life will amp it up to house-shaking. There will be many calls for calm, most of which will be drowned out by calls for blame and retribution.
Two hours after the shots rang out, Trump’s now-confirmed pick as vice-presidential running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, tweeted that “Biden’s rhetoric led directly to [the] attempted assassination”. Ignoring the fact that Trump is the architect of our incendiary political climate and blaming the other side is also classic bizarro-world behaviour. And it seems the shooter was a registered Republican who donated $15 to a Democratic political fund, giving both sides ample ammunition for the coming media war.
The image I’m looking forward to seeing least – and the one that will be splayed across the airwaves most – is the already-famous photo of a bleeding Trump with his fist raised high. Here’s how cynical I’ve become: when I saw the photo, my first thought was, “I’ll bet a quick-thinking staffer told him to do that.”
Trump the Fighter – among the most ridiculous of his many personas, as throughout his life he’s fled the instant the going got tough – will be omnipresent, and the people he’s convinced he’s fighting for will be even more ferociously committed.
I hope I’m wrong. Maybe this event will shock Trump and his MAGA-millions into toning down their poisonous rhetoric. It didn’t come until after he left office, but Reagan’s support for a 7-day waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on assault weapons were key to both measures becoming law. But hope is hard to come by in bizarro-world America. Maybe the first best step is to disconnect the Wi-Fi.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
