In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, rumors and half-baked theories flew almost as fast as bullets.
Before any facts were known, some Trump supporters accused President Joe Biden of orchestrating the attack. Their undercooked conspiratorial conjectures overlooked the fact that, should a sitting president be that bloodthirsty and Machiavellian, he likely would have been able to find a sniper able to hit a Trump-sized target from little more than a football field away.
Trump’s critics also traded in fantasy. Even as emergency personnel tended to the wounded and, tragically, the dead, opponents of the former president said the attack must have been staged to garner sympathy for the man and his candidacy. Their foolishness also overlooked key facts, most notably that a set-up wouldn’t have left a Trump supporter dead and others wounded.
It turns out, of course, that neither outlandish scenario was true.
The now-dead shooter, it appears, was another lonely young American male, often bullied at school, and enamored of America’s ever-expanding gun culture. He was 20 when he opened fire on the once and perhaps future president and a registered Republican who often quarreled with more liberal classmates about politics.
Just why he decided to try to shoot Donald Trump we don’t know. We may never know.
That’s one reason so many crackpot conspiracies took root so quickly. Uncertainty gives birth to a need for resolution, whether that resolution bears any resemblance to fact or not.
More than 60 years after the murder of President John Kennedy, America and the world are still awash in suppositions and guesses regarding his death.
In part, this is because of a human desire to balance history’s scales, to force irrational acts somehow to make a certain sense. We want to believe the assassination or attempted assassination of a president — a leader who speaks for millions, if not billions, of human beings — to be the act of some great movement.
We don’t want the fate of those millions, if not billions, of human beings to be altered by one lonely person weighted down with sadness to the point of despair and, all too often, disconnected from reality.
We want the figures who shape our time to be felled by forces as great as they are.
That’s one reason we veer so hungrily toward conspiracy theories.
Another, though, is that we Americans across the board are prepared — eager even — to think the worst of each other. In an environment in which we believe the people with whom we disagree to be devoid of character or integrity, it is easy to see every unfortunate or tragic development as a product of collaborative evil on the part of our opponents.
We need to see them not just as political adversaries, but as villains, devious characters unconstrained by moral accountability.
Following the tragic shooting at the former president’s Pennsylvania rally, leaders from across the political spectrum called for Americans to unite, to lower the temperature of partisan rhetoric and to renounce violence. They called for us to resolve our differences by arguing in the public square.
The sentiments doubtless were offered with the utmost sincerity.
The truth, though, is that political violence long has been a part of American life. Our very Constitution was drafted in response to an uprising in western Massachusetts. Few pages in our history are not stained with blood violently shed.
If it seems as though the incidents of violence have increased and intensified in recent years, that’s because they have.
We live now in an era in which large pockets of the American public, all with different backgrounds, interests and grievances, feel disaffected, even disenfranchised.
Appeals to these Americans to muzzle their anger and mute their rhetoric can have at best temporary effect until we deal with their grievances.
That will be difficult because, in a self-governing society, government is supposed to be the instrument through which we redress grievances and resolve differences.
But we have worked assiduously through several generations to erode trust in government as the expression of our will to live peaceably together.
It now is one of the many things in which we no longer believe.
So, we Americans now are left alone and isolated, islands of resentment and distrust in a raging sea of anger.
Twitching, as the song goes, like a finger on the trigger of a gun.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
