Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others, David Frum writes. https://lnkd.in/evBFCbdi
A shooting at a Trump rally on Saturday killed a person nearby, injured Donald Trump, and critically injured others. “It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence ‘has no place’ in American society,” Frum writes. “Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.”
“To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers,” Frum continues. “After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to ‘Fight!’ to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court … The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy.”
But, Frum argues, Trump should have forfeited his legitimate place in American life beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. “All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”
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E-Search Specialist (Data Consultant 3) at WA State Department of Health
2dI’m currently rereading “Dream Hoarders” by Richard Reeves and it is as amazing as it was the first time I read it. However, this time around it makes me look at my own life more deeply after some recent life changing events. I highly recommend it. https://www.brookings.edu/books/dream-hoarders/