After segregationist George Wallace’s 1972 presidential campaign was cut down by Arthur Bremer’s four bullets,
our own Shirley Chisholm, who was running the first presidential campaign by a woman, visited her rival at his bedside.
“What are your people going to say?” she recalled him asking her as Blacks in her community “crucified” her (her word). “I said, ‘I know what they’re going to say. But I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’ He cried and cried and cried.”
It was a moving moment in itself, and more so in the context of American history, whose occasional redemptions sometimes counterpoint the hate. It also helped seal Wallace’s move away from segregation. (In his last run for office in 1982, he won 90% of the Black vote.)
The shooting doesn’t have to have been staged for the staging of the response to the shooting to have been so flawlessly, so theatrically brilliant.
Any kind of encounter like that between our current presidential contenders—even if, fortunately, Trump is not in a hospital bed—seems beyond reach. The campaigns, content with the obligatory statements punched out by third-rung speechwriters, are busy figuring out how to leverage the moment to maximum advantage.
It’s been fascinating—frightening, really—to see how quickly the response to Saturday’s Trump assassination attempt followed familiar scripts that turn anything and everything, whether it’s a verbal miscue by U.S. President Joe Biden or a gun-terrorism act against former President Donald Trump, into just another occasion for bellicose marketing. Any measured response, any thought to carving out a moment’s political cooldown that the incident might call for and that this country ought to crave, any glance toward the kind of historical gesture Chisholm understood, is foreign to our scorched-earth elections.
Anything can and will be used to vilify and deify. Medieval pilgrims traded gold for relics such as the alleged thumb of John the Baptist or vials of the alleged blood of Christ from his crucifixion. This will be the first presidential race in history when blood will feature front and center in the Trump campaign’s most iconic image, the candidate bloodied but fist-pumping as an Iwo Jima-flag-like clutch of brawn props him up. Trump
is the flag. Trump is America. Welcome to assassination merch.
I am writing this less than 24 hours after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump had the good sense to say that “nothing is known at this time about the shooter,” as so much will be known soon. But the two sides have already staked their ground as if they knew as much about this as we do about Hinkley or
Moore or Bremer or Sirhan or Oswald or Zangara or Schrank or… (So many names.)
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) figured he’d use the occasion to make a final pitch for the vice presidency, using fascist rhetoric to blame Biden for the shooting and cleverly accusing
Biden of using fascist rhetoric to disarm Vance’s own. U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), a Republican who was himself wounded in an act of gun terrorism, piled on, as did of course Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her amen corner on Fox and the rest of the reactionary newspeak.
Not that Democrats would have done anything different had, say, Biden or former President Barack Obama been shot. They’re going one better, bristling with conspiracies that would give Don DeLillo a run for his
Libra. How could the shooter have made it to that roof in broad daylight, how could no snipers have picked out his AR-15, wasn’t the Secret Service warned of the intrusion, and so on, the absurd implication being that the whole thing was staged.
What if Trump maybe had not moved just so, like when Charles de Gaulle avoided an assassin’s bullet in one of the more than two dozen attempts on his life, just enough to avoid the lethal blow? What if the shooter had not “shot like a pig” (as de Gaulle put it about some of his own would-be assassins)? Would that have been staged, too? Is the rally victim killed by a bullet part of the staging?
Let’s not go down that route, especially since it’s superfluous anyway. The shooting doesn’t have to have been staged for the staging of the response to the shooting to have been so flawlessly, so theatrically brilliant. Ever the showman, Trump had the presence of mind to milk its every scarlet drop, giving Doug Mills of The New York Times his almost guaranteed shot at a Pulitzer with
that Joe Rosenthal-like photo. Reichstag fires don’t come around like this every day. Trump seized his.
Let’s also not shortchange the cooler statements from both sides, from Melania Trump to Mitch McConnell to Biden to Gabby Giffords—yet another public victim of gun terrorism—and many others. But you know well that those aren’t the voices that the propagandists, the vocal vigilantes, the campaign mercenaries, and their media accomplices are running with. Our politics’ temperature is not set by C-Span.
On the eve of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee—where, as a meaningless coincidence soon to be sanctified by the conventioneers and Trump himself, Teddy Roosevelt brushed off the bullet in his chest and kept talking outside the Gilpatrick Hotel, not far from the house of Bremer, Wallace’s would-be assassin—the shooting, the imagery, and the merchandise it enables are diamond currency in electoral math, now verging on 350 or thereabout for Trump. He can landslide his way to what he’ll call a mandate, his autocracy hallowed in his own blood while Biden continues his hobble of self-destruction.
Coincidentally this weekend I was reading about that relatively new “sport” called “Power Slap,” where competitors stand face to face and slap the hell out of each other until only one of them is left standing. It emerged out of the gladiatorial gutter of the Las Vegas-based Ultimate Fighting Championship, an extremely popular and profitable cash cow in a country where armchair sadism for millions substitutes for seeking the more meaningful in life.
“Power Slap” is not a sport. There’s no skill involved, no athleticism, no thought, certainly no intelligence, no strategy, just brute, beastly force delighting crowds that love violence for its own sake. It pretty much sums up the state of American politics and elections these days. We have a few more slaps ahead in the presidential contest, though the outcome is foretold. The contenders are not suffering the worst blows as much as our democracy. But these t-shirts and pins will be priceless.
