Trump’s shooting: a strangely difficult thing for his supporters to condemn
The only thing more difficult to contend with for the devout Donald Trump supporter this week, apart from the scare of his attempted assassination in the first place, is how to go about commentating on it without walking head-first into accusations of hypocrisy.
I am referring of course to the news story that made global headlines last weekend (and since): the attempted assassination attempt against former US President, current Republican candidate, and convicted felon Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania – which resulted in injury to the presidential hopeful and two audience members, and the death of another, one Corey Comperatore.
A concerted effort has been made to attach a philosophy of extreme liberalism to the named shooter – 20-year old Thomas Matthew Crooks – with a $15 donation he once made to a progressive cause being given more weight than his registered Republican status and his former classmates’ assertions that he “definitely was conservative”. It would’ve been convenient for Trump’s supporters if Crooks had fit the profile they’d been conjecturing online before the shooter was named: a radical far-leftie, a “blue-haired” trans or non-binary person, an immigrant, a person of colour. The apparently conservative, cis, male, white, and seemingly previously-innocuous Crooks doesn’t align with the traits the Trump doctrine typically vilifies, and which were hence immediately assumed of his shooter. And this revelation has muted much of the earlier discourse around how this incident indicts the ‘left’, leaving Trump supporters at a loss over how to condemn the would-be assassin without appearing hypocritical.
Because the other core factor Trump supporters suddenly want to keep mum on is, of course, the gun issue. Pro-gun culture has long been a cornerstone of conservative values, with the right to bear arms fervently defended by the same voices now struggling to navigate the narrative around the shooting. It appears it is quite hard to stick by the fight-fire-with-fire rigmarole that offers more weaponry and laxer laws as a solution to increasing gun violence, when the figurehead you look up to for espousing such viewpoints has become a victim of gun violence himself – and that, despite being one of the country’s most well protected people.
America’s culture around guns, and the growing normalisation of violence in general, is only going to keep crescendo-ing into shocking events like this in the absence of intervention. And for that fact, it’s harrowing to imagine a reality in which a successful assassination was carried out against Trump – and specifically, what the reaction from his supporters would have been then. After all, if January 6th represented the reaction to Trump losing an election, it’s hard to conceptualise the kind of chaos that would’ve ensued had it been his life he lost instead.
But of course, this was not the case. It has been reported that Trump escaped the attempted assassination with minimal injury. A bullet did hit his ear, drawing blood – and best believe it was no time before shirts brandishing pictures of him, bloodied jaw, thrusting a fist in the air, were being sold on his website, alongside his infamous slogan ‘Make America great again’ (the merch in question having been made in China). But this injury was the extent of the physical damage done to Trump; he otherwise escaped without bodily harm.
Here again, accidentally hypocritical commentators have taken to martyring Trump for this; ‘God protected Trump’, ‘God was looking down’, ‘God made sure he survived’… exclaiming so in blatant disregard for how that may sound to Comperatore’s family, and with no accounting for why God ‘let’ one of his supporters die instead.
Others suggest this incident has affirmed Trump’s suitability for office: “Who better to run the country? He literally took a bullet for America”. Unfortunately however, by that logic, there are countless American schoolchildren who are similarly qualified.
The one thing everyone can agree on unequivocally is that the likes of what happened last weekend is utterly unacceptable. But certain factions of American society – not least of all Trump’s supporters and more conservative voices – need to recognise that this unacceptability doesn’t arise from the fact that it was Trump specifically who was targeted.
Trumps supporters keep falling into hypocrisies while navigating what should be a home run for them – condemning their idol being shot – because it does not do to pretend this is more about a virtuosity competition between Democrats and Republicans, than it is about the culture of extremism and violence that’s begun to totally permeate America. A culture that opportunist, populist, and dangerous players (like Trump) have helped foster.
We do not know yet, and may not know ever, Crooks’ central motive in shooting Trump, and to have a constructive takeaway from this, we may not even need to. Reaction to this shooting ought not to be less about its political optics, and instead about what is said by the fact one of the most well protected men in America is not able to escape the violence and extremisms he helped catalyse.
