That didn’t take long.
Within hours of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, news stories began popping up about how the attack would impact the election.
Tony Diver wrote in The Telegraph, “If history tells us anything, the events of Saturday will only increase his support. In the months after Mr. (Ronald) Regan was shot, the newly elected Republican president saw a poll boost of eight points.”
The news and opinion business being what it is, that kind of analysis is predictable, perhaps inevitable, but it also speaks to a callousness in our culture. Must we really immediately view the events of Saturday in terms of poll points?
Full disclosure: As a talk show host, I’ll likely be talking soon about the impact on the election, but for now I cannot get past the instantly infamous image of former President Trump, bloodied and stunned, on the speaker’s platform.
Most haunting are the incredible images taken by the New York Times veteran photographer Doug Mills. They show the moment a bullet, which may have been the one that wounded Trump, rocketed past his head. An inch or less one way or another and Trump would have been gravely wounded, perhaps killed.
We all should be shaken to our core.
Any attack on a political figure, especially someone who is a former president and current candidate, is an attack on all, as well as our political process. That kind of violence is an existential threat that shakes our very foundation.
As Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman said on CNN, “For me, this isn’t about an opportunity for politics or strategy. This was an incredibly dark day for Pennsylvania but for the nation, too.”
We also cannot forget that the attack killed one individual at the rally and critically injured two others. They are victims of the worst political violence in this country in decades.
We don’t know yet the motive of the shooter. The best case scenario of this horrific act is that he was a deranged lone wolf and not part of any larger conspiracy. But we also know this: The tribalism of our politics has gotten worse in recent years and too many Americans view those on the other side as not just wrong, but evil.
I watched the movie “Civil War” Friday night. It is the story of a photographer covering a violent civil war in the United States in the not too distant future. Spoiler alert: The film climaxes with the president being assassinated. The film left me shaken because it strikes very close to home, given our current political climate.
Then Saturday night I was watching in real time the attempted assassination of a national leader. No, we are not on the brink of the kind of civil war portrayed in the movie, but the parallels are uncanny and unsettling.
We keep waiting for the kind of reckoning that returns us to our political senses, an event or series of events that create an equilibrium. Saturday’s attack, which killed one person, injured two others, and brought Donald Trump within an inch of his life, should serve as a starting point for a rejection of political hate and an opportunity for us to find within ourselves the capacity to better strengthen the fabric of our republic rather than ripping it apart with words and bullets.