So Trump was Almost Assassinated (Again)
And even less people give a shit.
It has been roughly two months since Donald Trump was almost assassinated for the first time, and its biggest consequence was that Tenacious D had to cancel their tour. After an immediate bump in the polls, the broader culture quickly pivoted to brat summer and mostly moved on. In a short time after Donald Trump posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to his Truth Social account, several gunshots were heard “in his vicinity” at his West Palm Beach golf resort, which would suggest that Swifties have activated kill-on-sight protocols. This wasn’t even the Caddyshack of assassination attempts—it was the Caddyshack II. While the nation treated the first assassination attempt like it was a crazed finale of a prestige TV drama, the reaction to the sequel has been a strange cold indifference. The first assassination attempt never crystallized into a month and a day like 9/11, and the specifics of when it even happened have since been long forgotten. The second one barely registered as news. A man whose single ambition was always to be on television is now not merely on it, but trapped and suffocating within it.
The most diseased factions of the MAGA base live within a prolonged and deranging fantasy of political violence, and their leader offers them nothing but the license to further lavish over those fantasies, and the teasing, titillating possibility that they will someday be permitted to act on their bloody impulses. Since this appeal is grounded in humiliation and retribution and anger, its expression has naturally come out vengeful and sour. In July, if that bullet weren’t a few inches off, those revenge fantasies would’ve likely spilled over into actual revenge. But it struck me as peculiar to see so many people who have declared Trump as the second coming of Hitler and his re-election as the end of American democracy also wish him a speedy recovery while condemning political violence, even if it’s against a potential president who would demonstrably make the world a worse place to live in. This puzzling disconnect dovetails with the gap between the Democrat’s doomsday rhetoric about ascendant fascism and their institutional refusal to fundamentally change the political system that has pushed America to this uneasy precipice.
The country has been more or less stuck with Trump for nearly a decade, and it is striking how much this election has been a mirror reflection of 2016, where his constant protagonism/antagonism in the news cycle has morphed him into MAGA Hillary Clinton. He is a thoroughly known quantity in American life—a boring and stupid man who will only ever do the same boring and stupid things he does for the same boring and stupid reasons. There is nothing he wouldn’t say, and once he starts saying something, he will never stop saying it—and will only ever say it louder and make it bigger—because to do anything else would be something more existential than merely admitting defeat. Given how overleveraged his whole being is on the issue of his own invincibility, it would be something like death.
As with so many other distress signals coming from the American right, Trump’s followers have lined up behind their leader to echo his bullshit and the result is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank gutter bigotry blasting from a thousand idiotic loudspeakers at every hour of the day. This is easy to understand at a base level—grown-ass dullards getting upset about something in a strange and theatrical way, couched in the pastiche of Tough Love And Hard Truths and summarized in the tagline, “Fuck Your Feelings.” Their tiresome spectacle is pretty much impossible to parse at every other level, but it has reshaped conservative politics into a bottomless and babyish appetite for umbrage and flattery.
This all amounts to a sort of grim fan service to an even grimmer fanbase. There is a basic bullying instinct undergirding all this full-spectrum ugliness, and these imperatives will only move in one direction—louder, more gruesome, more confrontational. The calculation seems less about political appeal, considering this hasn’t really worked out for Trumpists in national elections, and more about an innate understanding of what America’s media and political institutions will let them get away with and which people are the easiest to hurt in the process. If the obvious tactical challenge here is that this shit absolutely sucks and the majority of Americans despise it, the more fundamental one is that the internal incentives are such that it can only ever get more degrading. Trump’s followers put this prissy old dope at the center of their world, and the clammy aspiring genocidaires and mediocre opportunists who identified his rancid charisma as their ticket to stardom are all sucked into his deteriorating orbit.
One aspect of the Democratic pitch is the straightforward affirmation that all people are worthy of dignity; in Trump’s, you get a screeching, pop-eyed, manically cartwheeling refusal of that premise. This has mostly resonated with a base of people who feel those feels and get some low thrill from how angry it makes them, but this will struggle to win over the rest of Americans who quite understandably do not want to feel that way. There are a lot of fuming Americans who have a capacious and lazily brutal affinity for vengeance, and will indulge in the fantasy of punishing their perceived enemies until it is big enough to crowd out every other thing around them. There are also Americans who aspire to something more than that. A cohort of this country’s most fearful and most credulous and most idly vicious people has convinced themselves that every American secretly wants the same things they do and hates them for being too cucked to admit it. The Americans who want some semblance of a future will hold these seething MAGA doughnuts in contempt, not just because of their backwards and shabby aspirations, but because of how much smaller and anxious, and more spiteful and unappealing, those desires have made them.
A political movement whose most fundamental and animating idea is Make Progress Stop Happening would inevitably find itself fetishizing the torment of having to live in a nation that it professes to love while hating the majority of its population, its mainstream culture, its institutions, its media, and even its democracy—and the Americans who are not like them are supposed to matter. The limitations to this approach of, you know, making America great are not just obvious but overbearing. If the only possible engagement with any or every other person is to antagonize or dominate, not only will you end up lonely, but your indifference to other people’s well-being will in time be reciprocated. American politics has been a contest of dueling sadism, one that makes cruelty the point pitted against one that makes cruelty a byproduct. If you are dealing with a bully who has been actively tormenting you, and you have convinced yourself that their continued presence would only cause more suffering, at a certain point, you will just want this misery to stop, regardless of how it happens. Democratic voters have already implicitly decided that the Biden Administration’s tacit support for abject human annihilation in Gaza is not enough to deter them from Vote Blue No Matter Who because, in their rationalization, they are voting to stop a greater evil. Why would they give a shit if Trump is killed?
The Democratic gambit of painting contemporary American conservatism as the province of lonely fuming weirdos, sociopathic bigots, and billionaire adult libertarians is not just long overdue, but liberating and manifestly accurate. In lieu of any solution to any problem, Republican apparatchiks and media remoras have pivoted to serving Trump’s catastrophic tastes while his insult-comic zest further slumps into obscure complaints about whatever odious lie he just saw on reactionary cable programming. His movement has followed suit, culminating in one of the most farcical events in modern American history where hordes of fascist dorks and hair-trigger mee-maws stormed the Capitol and farted on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. A political movement built on the signature combination of servility, sadism and selfishness would naturally be inclined toward someone like Trump, and their ongoing crises and anxieties and degrading mimesis would only grow louder and more chaotic. The tide rushes out on everything else, the respect they expect in return is diminishing, the baseline empathy has long been tapped dry.
If you start to think of Trump’s fans as addled devourers of fan fiction and the greasy, servile strivers in the MAGA Cinematic Universe as classic hey-guys-please-like-and-share content creators, they start to resemble something that’s not like actual human beings. And the nature of politics-as-content-creation is that it can never turn off or calm down, which is the dead end that American conservatism was steering toward long before Trump took the wheel. It would be a fitting end for such a cynical movement to wind up watching its seething antiheroes fade into obscurity, a bygone era of America’s onset internet brain fusing with demented culture war and right-wing kookery. When your whole ethos is “Fuck Your Feelings,” the only logical conclusion is that your blithe sociopathy would eventually be reimbursed with a complete lack of regard toward your entire being. This is the world the conservative project has worked tirelessly to build and it has become endlessly tiresome. It would’ve been very chic for Donald Trump to have died (again), but this is more of an ultimate and existential humiliation. He once faced down death like it was nothing; now he’s facing irrelevancy.
The irony of this latest attempt is that Florida's gun laws are so lax that the charges are minimal at best. The dissonance these people live with is amazing. No wonder they're so pissed off all the time!
Wake me when he actually does get shot.