Editor’s Note: This column was written prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.
So Donald Trump got shot, and that’s… not great!
I mean, listen, I loathe the man. The America he wants us all to live in is a nightmare and the fact that the entire Republican Party supports Nightmarica truly keeps me up at night.
But the fact that someone tried to assassinate him is horrifying.
As I write this, the shooter’s motive isn’t known. But when I saw a photo of him, I said, “Jesus, he’s a kid.” He only graduated from high school a couple of years ago, which means that a big chunk of his formative years took place in the haze of hateful politics led in large part by Trump. That isn’t healthy for anyone.
On Trump’s social media platform he wrote, “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country.”
To which I say, “What country does Trump live in?” The U.S. is awash in guns thanks, in large part, to Republican policies that make guns designed for mass murder easier to get and nearly impossible to trace. The U.S. government keeps track of every time you buy Sudafed, but not every time you buy a gun. Mass shootings happen on the regular. Trump’s statement reveals just how out of touch he is with reality.
And then there’s the violent, hateful rhetoric that Trump himself has spouted from the moment he declared his candidacy in 2015. The man loves himself some revenge politics. He’s never been interested in trying to make life better for people. He’s interested in singling out his “enemies” (which is anyone who disagrees with him or tries to hold him accountable). And his supporters are ready and willing to help him exact retribution, i.e. the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2020.
President Joe Biden responded to the shooting saying, “An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation. Everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen.
“Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important than that right now — unity.”
Sure, unity sounds great and all. But to say that someone being shot is “not America” is simply not true. Shootings happen all the time. Getting shot is practically an American tradition.
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., had, I think, the best response to all of this.
“‘This is not who we are, America’ just doesn’t ring true to me,” she posted on X. “My father was assassinated in this nation, gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, where he was engaged as a nonviolent warrior for nondiscriminatory, humane wages. He was killed for working to end racism, poverty, and militarism, which he called the Triple Evils, and which are all still perpetuated both in policy and practice by the United States of America. This is not who we should be. With that honest statement about our culture of violence, political and otherwise, we can rise up to eradicate injustice and violence, and reform our rhetoric.”
Dr. King’s vision for America is the one I want to live in. Honestly, I think that’s the version of America that most Americans want to live in. But we have been divided by so much dishonesty and inaction by our elected leaders that we simply don’t trust one another.
Seriously, though, I feel scared. I am bracing for retaliatory violence. I am worried about the future, especially for my son. The parents and grandparents of kids today have an obligation to make the world a better place for their kids. An obligation that is not being met.
We need to do better. And I believe that we can do better. We have to. We are not in a good place as a country, as a people. I don’t know how we come together for the greater good. Just look at the COVID-19 response. That was a time when we should have been united against a virus that killed so many. And yet, we weren’t. And our president at the time was a big part of why the pandemic just tore us further apart. And if Trump is elected again, I fear that divide will grow deeper.
In another post on X, King wrote, “Sincere, love-centered calls for ‘unity’ must be accompanied by work for true peace, which includes justice. ‘Justice at its best,’ my father said, ‘is love correcting everything that stands against love.’ Correcting systems, correcting education, correcting thinking, correcting language, correcting policy, etc.”
Could we just let Bernice King be President? That would be great, thanks.