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trump assassination attempt
Assassination Attempt No. 2 in a Land That Worships the God of Violence
Hold a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the agency of the commander-in-chief. What could happen next is not hard to imagine. Indeed, as we know, it happens all the time.
Sep 19, 2024
“The man suspected in the incident... camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, according to court documents filed Monday. He is accused of lying in wait for the former president before a Secret Service agent opened fire, thwarting the potential attack.”
The guy was apparently waiting to assassinate Donald Trump—attempt No. 2 this election season to kill the former president. The would-be alleged assassin was thwarted before he fired a shot, but still...
What the hell?
Mass killings, political assassination attempts or, indeed, any resort to violence, especially when such phenomena start to become “normal,” indicate a social problem that transcends gun availability.
Something is crazy-wrong in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. I think it amounts to this (to put it in advertising terms): The kwik-option to make your point—to win the argument—is way too readily available. Hate someone’s politics? Feel ignored? Feel your interests being threatened? There’s a far simpler “solution” available than actually tying to address the issue in the real world: Just kill it!
While I support more stringent gun-control regulations, I have minimal faith in a purely bureaucratic fix to this enormously psycho-spiritual issue. America is the inheritor of the delusion of empire—not just geopolitically but domestically. Our country was born not just in a cry for freedom (for some), but also in slavery and genocidal land theft. This hellish facet of our history hasn’t gone away. Our national belief in violence may hide behind the words on the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...,”—but this belief is at the core of who we are and how we act.
Let me put this another way: This is the god we worship.
We have a trillion-dollar annual military budget and—certainly throughout my lifetime—have launched unbelievably horrific wars around the world. We’ve claimed the mantle of global colonialism. We support our “interests” (excuse me, our security and our values) with, as Vice President Kamala Harris put it, “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
This is how you get cheers: We run things, man. We run the planet. Hurray! My point here is that this attitude spreads—domestically—like a social disease. If you are a stalwart, unskeptical patriot, you have no choice but to worship the god of violence. And maybe, just maybe, you feel the presence of this god not just abstractly, at the level of the national government, but within your own soul. Hold a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the agency of the commander-in-chief. What could happen next is not hard to imagine. Indeed, as we know, it happens all the time.
In other words, mass killings, political assassination attempts or, indeed, any resort to violence, especially when such phenomena start to become “normal,” indicate a social problem that transcends gun availability. For God’s sake, why is this happening? It’s a social problem that is, you might say, spiritual in nature, and must be addressed as such—whatever that means.
At the very least, it means that, as a society—as a species—we need to move seriously beyond our worship of the god of violence, or what theologian and author Walter Wink has called “the myth of redemptive violence.” We need to move beyond our unquestioned assumption that it settles conflict and fixes problems. Talking to one another—negotiating with the enemy, transcending conflict by working to create a world that works for everybody—can be unimaginably complex. It doesn’t make for quick and easy headlines or movie plots.
Indeed, in the real world, violent “solutions” always cause further harm, even if some temporary good is also accomplished. Violent victories come with repression and eventual backlash. But you wouldn’t know this from the myth of redemptive violence, which endlessly portrays violence—well, “good violence”—as consequence free.
As I wrote several years ago:
Strike up the orchestra. Here’s how it plays out: John Wayne, the Ringo Kid, has climbed atop the stagecoach and the Apaches are tearing after them as the music swells. In two minutes of the 1939 John Ford classic Stagecoach, I counted 15 Indians dying, each one flying dramatically off his horse. There are hundreds of them, hooting, armed with rifles, but they never hit anyone. They have almost no impact on the valiant stagecoach, on which four white men return fire at the savages with grim precision. One of them actually has a wry smile on his face, relishing his opportunity to do so. They blast away. Eventually the cavalry shows up and the Indians flee.
Yeah, the myth of redemptive violence is God’s gift to scriptwriters. And worse. It’s God’s pseudo-gift to lost souls who decide that their best hope is to blast all their problems off Planet Earth.
I write these words believing only this: Violence will never fully go away, but national policy must transcend war. All we can do is keep pushing beyond that myth of redemptive violence—toward redemptive connection and understanding.
I end with the words of a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who was in a writing class I convened for a while, many years ago, at a Chicago elementary school. I learned much about the nature of gang life from his words, including the ritual of tossing someone’s shoes over a telephone wire, as a memorial, if he’s shot, if he’s killed.
In a writing exercise, Jose wrote:
One of my friends he got stabbed with a pencil because he was in a gang, but now he isn’t in a gang because he doesn’t want his family to see his shoes dangling from a telephone wire. And he wants to go back and fix all the things he has done wrong and now he never wants to have a relation with a gang member. Now he is in my house to play video games.
America, America: It’s possible to transcend war. It’s possible to stop worshiping the god of violence.
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Trump 'Safe' After Shots Fired Near to Him on Golf Course
"Violence has no place in America," said U.S. Vice President and his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.
Sep 15, 2024
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates...
Update (6:18 pm):
The FBI said on Sunday that it was "investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination” of former U.S. President Donald Trump after members of the Secret Service fired shots at an individual who appeared to place the muzzle of a rifle over the perimeter of where Trump was playing golf in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump wrote in a fundraising email that he was "SAFE AND WELL" following the incident.
Several public figures issued statements condemning political violence.
Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz wrote on social media that he and his wife Gwen were "glad to hear that Donald Trump is safe."
"Violence has no place in our country. It's not who we are as a nation," Walz wrote.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said: "I am relieved that President Trump and those that were with him are safe. This is a deeply concerning time for our country, and I pray we can prevent this kind of violence and find ways to heal the divisions."
Earlier:
Former U.S. President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is "safe" after gunshots were fired "in his vicinity," the Trump campaign announced on Sunday.
Law enforcement officials toldThe Associated Press that Secret Service agents opened fire after they saw an individual appear to lift the muzzle of their rifle through the barrier surrounding Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida while he was playing. The suspect then fled in an SUV and was later apprehended by local law enforcement. An AK-style rifle was later found on the grounds of the golf course.
The Secret Service said that the incident took place around 2 pm Eastern Time.
Steven Cheung, the Trump Campaign's communications director, said there were "no further details at this time."
The incident comes a month and two days after Trump survived an assassination attempt while speaking at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
"I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe," U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on social media. "Violence has no place in America."
The White House said in a statement that it was "relieved" the Trump was safe.
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Election 2024 Won’t Be a Trump/Biden Rematch; What’s Next?
The stakes are still as high as they were since the campaigns kicked off more than a year ago.
Jul 23, 2024
Even before U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, November’s presidential election had become a dizzying roller-coaster ride.
In the run-up to this election, the Democratic Party failed to consider the impact a weakened Biden would have on the electorate, and it assumed that fear of former president Donald Trump would be enough to win.
In just the past few weeks, however, two new factors emerged, wreaking additional havoc on the foundation of these two assumptions: the horrifying mass shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the growing chorus of prominent Democrats urging Biden to step down as their party’s presidential nominee.
This is truly, as my brother John would say, “an Armageddon election.”
Even before last week’s Republican National Convention, polls were showing Trump commanding the support of his party’s faithful. In the aftermath of the shooting, the embrace intensified, with some seeing his escape as a sign of divine intervention.
This deification of Trump and the wild enthusiasm seen at the Republican convention made Democrats more concerned about their electoral prospects and more troubled by Biden’s all-too-apparent weaknesses.
His frailty was already an issue, having come into sharp focus during the June 27 debate. With polls showing almost two thirds of Democrats displeased with Biden, senior party elected officials had publicly urged the president to pass the torch to a younger candidate.
Now that Biden has withdrawn his candidacy and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be his party’s nominee, the election is once again wide open. Harris isn’t the nominee just yet, with various factions in the Democratic Party possibly jockeying for power, but she will be the hot favorite ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month.
It is fair to say, then, that the current election cycle has been topsy-turvy, particularly over the past week. And yet it’s worth pointing out that within the larger American political context, it is still business as usual.
For starters, the stakes are still as high as they were since the campaigns kicked off more than a year ago.
This is truly, as my brother John would say, “an Armageddon election.” No matter who emerges as the Democratic nominee, this will be a contest between two fundamentally different visions of America. Despite Trump’s statement that it was time to unify the country, his convention, choice of a running mate, and the rhetoric used by many of the Republican convention’s speakers made it clear that the leopard hasn’t changed its spots.
The Trump-led GOP continues to prey on the fears and anger of the white working class, using the same exploitation of social and cultural issues and racist and Christian nationalist xenophobia and resentment of “elites” that they have been cultivating for years. This will distract attention from their policies favoring the wealthiest and most entitled at the expense of the safety, security, and prosperity of the middle class and those seeking to become middle class.
Trump will continue to project his frightening dystopian vision of American life, targeting his favorite line-up of evildoers—federal law enforcement, media elites, immigrants. His use of ridicule and hostile language will continue to inflame passions and incite violence.
Democrats, meanwhile, will continue to call for greater economic, social, and political equity. Biden had previously called out the widening income gap between the richest Americans and those struggling to make ends meet. Democrats will call for a fairer tax system, a raised minimum wage, and protection of unions and labor rights.
Despite their crackdown to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, they’ll call for a humane approach to those fleeing persecution. They will call for expanded healthcare, lower drug prices, support of women’s rights to make their own healthcare decisions, and continued progress towards racial justice.
And finally, Democrats will continue to focus this election on the need to protect democracy and the rule of law, warning about the threat posed by Trump supporters’ plans to reject the outcome of this election by using administrative tactics and even violence as they did in 2020 to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
One additional factor that will remain the same is the threat posed by gun violence and the failure of the GOP to support even modest gun control reforms—despite the attempt on Trump’s life.
America now has more than one mass shooting each day, with tens of thousands needlessly losing their lives in these and other shootings. It still hasn’t addressed its diseased obsession with weapons. Nor has it faced up to the fact that political violence is not an aberration, when in fact it is who we are as Americans.
When The New York Times writes as editorial titled “The Attack on Trump is Antithetical to America,” or when Biden asserts that political violence isn’t who we are or that it’s an aberration, they are ignoring the reality that political violence is “as American as cherry pie.”
Living in denial is not only ignoring the dozens of attempted assassinations that have defined American history, but also means that the country isn’t ready to learn lessons and take much needed remedial steps to end this plague.
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