Violence and Incitement in America

On September 4, two students and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Georgia. Nine others were wounded. The Apalachee High School shooting scarcely ranks in the top 20 deadliest such incidents in U.S. history. Apalachee was just another American massacre, an unhappy “fact of life,” in the words of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance.

Most American mass-shooting victims are not students in school. On July 21, nine people were shot, including three killed, at a street party on North Alden Street in Philadelphia. That same day, there were mass shootings in Anderson, Indiana, as well as Indianola and Jackson, Mississippi, for a weekend total of six dead and at least 30 wounded.

And yesterday, the Secret Service engaged a man whom agents saw poking a semiautomatic rifle through a golf-course fence, in what the FBI described as an apparent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. All Americans of civic conscience can rejoice that the former president is unharmed, myself along with them.

Yet conscientious Americans should also remember:

According to the records kept by the independent Gun Violence Archive, 82 Americans died in mass-casualty shootings from July 14, through September 14 of this year. Very many more died in individual shootings, intentional and accidental, or ended their own life by gunshot over those same two months. Hundreds were injured. The beginning and end dates of the tally period are not chosen at random; they are the interval between the attempt on Trump’s life on July 13 and the attempt on his life on September 15.

After each of those acts against Trump, the air filled with the usual phrases. “Violence has no place in America,” Vice President Kamala Harris posted on social media. “Violence has no place in our country,” agreed her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. “It’s not who we are as a nation.” Those are laudable sentiments, but they are sadly untrue. Violence has a very large place in America. Compared with other democracies, violence does define “who we are as a nation.”

Firearms are everywhere in America, and people use them to kill Americans on a scale that no other developed society tolerates for its own people. One of Trump’s first actions as president was to rescind an Obama-era law that sought to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerously mentally ill people.

For a decade, this dangerous political environment has been uniquely inflamed by Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric.

Only in the past week, the city of Springfield, Ohio, has had to lock down two hospitals, evacuate three schools on consecutive days, and empty municipal buildings because of threats by a person animated by Trump’s untrue claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in the town.

When the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi was hammered nearly to death by a home intruder, Trump jeered and mocked him, saying to one crowd, “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco—how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” In his first race for president, Trump trafficked in innuendo about assassinating Hillary Clinton. He has fantasized about executing critics such as former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. A survey of volunteers at polling places found that almost 40 percent of them had faced threats and abuse. Although the survey did not break down the source of the threats, a close investigation by Reuters described “a year of terroristic threats from supporters of former President Donald Trump, inspired by his false assertions of widespread fraud in the 2020 vote.”

Trump has treated political violence as a resource. When it’s not a way to intimidate adversaries, it’s a way to mobilize supporters. After the first attempt on his life, in July, Republican convention-goers adopted their own versions of Trump’s rectangular ear bandage as a badge of loyalty. The first Trump fundraising appeals were mass-emailed within minutes of this second incident.

But violence is the very opposite of a resource. It’s a blight on American society—and a pervasive menace to democratic politics—whether nationally or in the single Trump-afflicted city of Springfield.

Anti-crime laws are sometimes named for the victims who inspired them. Megan’s Law requires federal authorities to make information available to the public about registered sex offenders. Jessica’s Law imposes a minimum 25-year sentence on Florida sex offenders who harm children under age 12. And of course, one of America’s few experiments in gun regulation is known as the Brady Bill, after James Brady, the former press secretary to Ronald Reagan who was cruelly disabled by the attempt on the president’s life in 1981. Perhaps when Americans do at last get serious about restricting military-type weapons, in light of these two failed assassination attempts involving such firearms, the legislation might be called “Trump’s Law,” as a reminder of the acts of violence we should not tolerate.

The spread of military-style rifles helped enable the attempts on Trump. Reagan’s would-be assassin used a small six-shot revolver, a weapon easily concealed but potentially devastating only at short range. In 1975, two different assassins tried to kill Gerald Ford within 17 days of each other. They both used pistols from within a crowd. One gun misfired; the other was knocked from the would-be killer’s hand by a heroic bystander who’d forced his way through the crowd to grab her arm before she could fire a second shot.

Both Trump assailants carried riflesinstead. Those assailantscould fire from much longer ranges and strike others even when they missed their intended target. This is the deadly threat, so hard to defend against, that American schoolchildren live with. Maybe Trump could raise his voice against the routine gun violence that spared him but has destroyed so many others. It may be a “fact of life” for now, but it does not have to be. It could change. Trump could speak out against the weapons used by his assailants—and learn some sympathy and even compassion for the many thousands of Americans who escaped less lightly than he did from those weapons’ harm.

But he probably won’t.

Trump and his supporters are acutely (and properly) sensitive to provocative expression when used against him. In 2017, the comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a mock severed Trump head, as if she were an ISIS terrorist who had decapitated a victim. Condemnation was swift and devastating. The Secret Service investigated her, she was placed on no-fly lists, friends broke with her, her career took a hit. Yet Trump and his supporters have seldom shown reciprocal care for those on the receiving end of their abuse. Hours after yesterday’s incident involving Trump, Elon Musk tweeted “and no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” followed by a chin-stroking emoji. (Musk later deleted the post.)

For them, sympathy is a strictly one-way option: something demanded for themselves, never allowed to others. Trump wants to use the July assassination attempt and this latest event to silence criticism, even as he circulates provocative and dangerous defamations of others who lack protection by the Secret Service. In a Fox News interview today, Trump described his political opponents as “the enemy from within,” a “real threat” that is “destroying the country.”

As a human being and a former president, Trump deserves and gets the relief of the nation that he was unharmed. But there’s a rule of human nature to keep in mind. When Reagan appeared before Congress for the first time after the shooting that nearly killed him while severely wounding three others, all members of the House and Senate, of both parties, erupted in sustained and grateful applause—to which Reagan responded with a characteristically modest joke: “You wouldn’t want to talk me into an encore, would you?”

Through his ordeal, Reagan had shown grace, courage, and humanity. Only years later did Reagan’s former speechwriter Peggy Noonan reveal that after he had made a mess in his hospital bathroom in the middle of the night, the bandaged president kneeled to clean it up himself so that the nurses wouldn’t have to do the job for him. Reagan gained near-universal admiration because he respected universal decencies.

Yesterday morning, Trump posted “I hate Taylor Swift!” on his Truth Social account. That statement came just minutes after his running mate’s admission in a CNN interview that he was willing to “create stories” such as the one about Springfield in order to promote his anti-immigration agenda. As my Atlantic colleague Ronald Brownstein has written, Trump regards himself as a “wartime president”—only the war he’s leading is one against his own country. Trump wants to punish his opponents and seeks office to gain the power to exercise revenge. He himself long ago chose to be president of only some of the American people, less than half of them.

Trump briefly wanted to use his first shooting to tell a story of transformation and redemption. Yet he himself was the first to abandon the reinvention, within the very same speech in which he sought to demonstrate it. He is who he is; he is what he is. The violence he faced—and mercifully survived—did not change him. The judgment is still open, however, on the changes wrought by the violence against others that he incites and delights in.