This New World: The Trump Assassination Attempt and the State of Things

America keeps finding new and disturbing ways to break your heart.

Dispatches From A Collapsing State is an independent venture and depends on your support. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to support this project and keep it going.

---

The past couple of days have been surreal. A punch to the gut marked by repeated viewings of an attempted murder in front of a camera and a murder just out of frame. Over and over and over again we have been forced to watch a gun violence play out on our screens. To see Donald Trump survive an assassination attempt and then rise from the stage covered in his blood. Occasional replays include supporters wearing gore-stained shirts. Standing in shock and anger. And it has played and played and played and played and played.

There’s trauma in this. Being subjected to the gruesome horrors of gun violence. Of course, our media relishes these moments. And this one is perfect for television consumption. After the first shocked viewing, we know it’s coming. After a few viewings, we learn the beats. We prepare for Trump to grab his ear and fall. The agents to swarm him. Then, the dazed gathering, the raised fist. Away in the car.

We’ve got so many angles. So much bonus material. Like a movie. The snipers reacting. Almost every angle imaginable. The would-be assassin on the roof. The supporters trying to alert police. Even the shooter’s death.

It is meant to be overwhelming. And it is even more grotesque that it has been utilized by our media as an active backdrop, a repeated vision of an attempted murder that plays continuously while overpaid, incurious talking heads prattle on with some of the most inane and offensive commentary you could ever offer up. It is beyond disturbing and, like every crisis and tragedy in the modern age, the putridness of the moment should make everyone stand back, take a breath, and look deep, deep into the mirror and wonder how it came to this.

A few things are clear and need stated.

1. You defeat a despot at the ballot box and work to create political affiliations and movements to undermine their destructive goals or else the problem gets worse. You cannot kill ideas. We should have learned this during the War on Terror and yet the faulty notion continues to proliferate.

2. Our media and political class are decidedly not equal to the exceptional challenges of the moment. They lack the nuance necessary to discuss anything of actual importance. They lack the historical context to understand anything that’s happening. And they lack the human experience or empathy to care about the millions upon millions of Americans who are suffering the brunt of late-neoliberal globalism and rising authoritarianism.

3. America is a deeply, deeply unwell country that continues to spiral and decline as that unwellness worsens.

4. A culture of white patriarchal supremacy, predicated on deep-rooted insecurities that foment unconsciously, mixes with a culture of semi-automatic weapons like kerosene to a flame.

5. This crisis was created by the failures of the status quo and then worsened by an authoritarian movement that capitalized on that crisis in order to push a violent, destructive environment that would always, always lead to this moment.

Beyond that, we’re in some real minute-by-minute shit here.

“The Political Climate”

Since the shooting we have been told, by every stuffed suit available to get in the makeup chair and appear on live cable news, that the real villain here is “the rhetoric” and “the political climate.”

Fine. Sure. There’s a point to be made here.

But it is vital to recognize the form this conversation always takes. As I’ve discussed ad nauseum, our political and media classes are populated largely by Centrists who are quick to decry “both sides.” This means “the Right” and “the Left,” even though there is absolutely no “leftist” influence in politics or culture following its systematic destruction and depowering. It’s an easy game to play, after all. The majority of people consuming this news or following politics are concerned by “extremism” wherever it may be found. The Center continually plays this “both sides” game, making sure to equate an authoritarian movement daydreaming about public executions and featuring legislative leaders calling for “a bloodless revolution…if the Left allows it to be” with protests of an ongoing genocide, calls for accurate history to be taught, and for vulnerable communities to be free of targeting, constant harassment, and live beyond fear of being arrested or murdered for simply existing.

“Let’s lower the temperature” is one of the most asinine things I’ve heard. And I’ve heard a lot.

President Joe Biden has once again proven he is not the man for the moment. On Sunday nigtht he gave exactly the kind of address from the Oval Office you could have predicted word-for-word from a president. Great. Way to be presidential. But that performance undermined every single issue at stake in the 2024 Election and American politics in general.

Biden has been wrong on a variety of things. But his insistence that “this isn’t America” any time there are authoritarian pushes and victories or moments of mass violence is an absurdity and offensive. This is America. From the very beginning this country has been defined by sporadic and planned violence. The enslavement of human beings. The planned genocide of an entire people. Every step along the way, over the course of its 248 year history, America has been defined by violence and the battle between authoritarianism and democracy.

Regardless of what happened in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. That was true before the bullet left the gun and long after he was carried off the stage. Nothing changes that. Nothing. His agenda will not change and the agenda of the wealth class he represents will not change. The only thing changing is how the Center will choose to even discuss that fact, if they now choose to discuss it at all.

Biden, the Democratic Party, and our media have now told millions of Americans that their lives and fates are secondary to an artifical state of decorum. And I struggle to believe, for a second, that there is going to be anything substantial mounted in their defense in the run-up to November’s election. And I shouldn’t be surprised and you shouldn’t either. With every Court ruling, with every Red State oppression, the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party has signaled “concern” while doing very little to offer solutions or a fight in return. Apparently even calling this authoritarianism by its actual name has become too much.

Decorum, after all.

Representative Jared Golden should be thanked for this tweet. It lays it all out pretty clear. For a lot of Democrats, campaigning against the threat of authoritarianism has been a game. A means of fundraising, whipping up supporters. Underneath it, what mattered was holding onto power and continuing a destructive status quo. It’s good to know that. It’s good to receive that clarity.

In a recent Axios exclusive it was made clear in one damning quote:

Good for them. They can easily resign themselves to a second Trump Presidency. Their perches apparently give them that privilege. They have the money and influence to be above a proposed presidency that has been very open about what it is determined to do, including using the full might and violence of the U.S. military to terrorize immigrants, create an active and muscular apartheid state, virtually erase the existence of every LGBTQ American, finalize the work of destroying the progress of the Civil Rights Era, and completing the wealth class’s takeover of the reins of power.

When that isn’t a concern, and when it isn’t your life, or the lives of people you care about, then I guess resigning is an option.

We have been ill-served for a very, very long time. And we are past the point of pretending otherwise.

Trump should not have been shot at. The tragedy Saturday afternoon should have never happened. But to take this as a moment to soft-launch and welcome authoritarianism because decorum demands it is a level of offensive and deplorable that words struggle to fully communicate it. This morning, the case against Trump for stealing classified documents was dismissed. Because he survived an assassination attempt, he’ll now be given undue respect and a benefit of the doubt he has never, ever earned. Already we have to hear how “strong” he looked. We’re told “Today, We’re All MAGA.” Never mind that associating with that ideology means actively embracing white, patriarchal supremacy and advocating an aggressive attack on democracy and vulnerable peoples.

Those of us who care about the fates of vulnerable and targeted communities, who worry about democracy itself, who want our children to be safe, spared backbreaking labor and unnecessary abuse, and given a fighting chance with education, are now orphans. The “adults in the room” have decided that things got out of hand. The need to even signal support for the rest of us was too much, too dangerous, and obviously the reason any of this happened.

In other words, it wasn’t the constant drumbeat of authoritarianism focusing on blood and warfare and violence that caused this.

It was your desire to exist and/or expect the state to protect your right to exist.

It was too much, that expectation. And so now those “frivolous” and “dangerous” things, meaning democracy and the supposed protections of liberal democracy itself, are negotiable. Subject first to considerations of decorum.

Everything after that, well, who knows.