WASHINGTON—The assassination attempt against planned Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may give extremists yet another lever to pull the country ever farther in their right-wing direction—just as they have done by using political violence in the past.
Gunman Thomas Crooks, firing a semi-automatic weapon from the roof of a nearby building during a Trump rally in Butler, Pa., winged Trump’s right ear during the July 13 event. Crooks killed Corey Comparatore, a small-town fire chief, shot in the head while protecting his family, and severely wounded two others.
The Secret Service shot Crooks dead. Police are still probing for his motives. Crooks, 20, was described as a “loner” by neighbors and a high school classmate of his told the press he was a victim of severe bullying in those days. He was ridiculed for his social isolation and for the way he dressed, his classmate said.
Many unknowns still surround the circumstances of the event, including apparent lapses in security. Several people present at the rally have told various international and national media outlets that they witnessed presumably the would-be assassin, climbing to the top of the factory building and alerted police. The AP has reported that one local policeman did reach the top of the building and confronted Crooks but ducked when Crooks pointed his rifle at the officer. Moments later, Crooks opened fire toward Trump’s direction.
Those unanswered questions and others are fueling conspiracy theories of various kinds online but also prompting many to ask what really happened.
After the attempted assassination, much of the corporate media launched into a full-fledged campaign about the need for “both sides” in the nation to cool political rhetoric and “come together,” “united in their roles as Americans, people with differences but people who respect one another.”
They interviewed many participants in the rally who asked in bewilderment, “How could this happen in America?” In none of the reports did either the people being interviewed or the media bring up the role of Trump’s MAGA Republicans in fomenting violence in the nation over the past several years. There was no mention of the Jan. 6 attacks they mounted after Trump encouraged them, resulting in the death of five in the nation’s capital. There was no mention of Trump’s praising as “good people” some of the neo-Nazis who killed a woman in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, or of the Trump supporters who plotted to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan, or any of the many other examples of violence incited and carried out by MAGA supporters.
They also failed to interview any in the mob of Trump supporters who surrounded and tried to attack reporters in the moments after the shooting. After Trump was ushered off stage, many rally-goers jeered and cursed at the cameras, using profanity, making obscene gestures, and telling the press, “ F— you,” and “You’re next.”
Manipulative calls for “unity”
If past is prologue, the radical right may seize upon the universal condemnation and calls for “unity” to try to further impose its agenda on the rest of the country. Examples:
After John Wilkes Booth, a Southern racist, murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Lincoln’s vice president and successor, Andrew Johnson, declared a later amnesty for Confederate leaders, and did nothing to help newly freed African-Americans exercise their rights, much less gain economic independence from Southern masters.
His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, reversed that course, reviving Reconstruction. Grant sent troops South to protect freed people and their white allies from the murders and depredations of the Ku Klux Klan. He also collaborated with Congress to pass a far-reaching civil rights law.
By the end of Grant’s tenure, Northern corporate interests, more interested in the economic exploitation of Blacks and the South than in political freedom, turned a blind eye to the ex-rebels who instituted Jim Crow. The Supreme Court annulled the civil rights law and later blessed “separate but equal.”
Though there were no assassination attempts on Woodrow Wilson during World War I, a bombing attempt in D.C. of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house gave Palmer an excuse for wholesale roundups and deportations of suspected “radicals,” including union leaders, leftists, Communists, and Socialists.
Congress, by then controlled by right-wing Republicans, went along, put infamous G-man J. Edgar Hoover in charge, and even banned Socialist Rep. Victor Berger of Milwaukee from the House on charges of sedition.
Unsuccessful attempt on Roosevelt
An unsuccessful assassination attempt on then-President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 did not deter his New Deal reforms, rescuing capitalism from its own worst excesses. The next year, Wall Street titans who hated “that man in the White House” and his “Socialistic” policies, schemed with the American Legion to supersede FDR with conservative retired Gen. Smedley Butler. They misjudged Butler, a constitutional conservative, who blew the whistle.
Fast-forward to 1968, and the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Violence erupted in U.S. cities and then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who would be termed a corporate Democrat by today’s norms, issued an infamous order to his cops to “shoot to kill” rioters and looters. Kennedy was running on an anti-Vietnam War platform, driving incumbent President Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential race. King also opposed the war. Tens of thousands of anti-war activists descended on that year’s Democratic Convention in Chicago, and Daley turned his cops loose on them in what was later evaluated as “a police riot” by an independent report.
Republican Richard Nixon rode a “law and order” right-wing platform and Democratic divisions over the war into the White House and implemented his own escalation of the war under the guise of “Vietnamization.” Nixon invaded Cambodia/Kampuchea and Laos, too.
“Watch what we do, not what we say,” was one version of Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell’s reaction to the 1968 riots. “What we do” included killing anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio—by National Guards sent by Republican Gov. James Rhodes—and Jackson State University in Mississippi, a Pentagon Papers press censorship try by Nixon and Mitchell, and, ultimately, Watergate.
Fast-forward again, to the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. The rightists, led by George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, used that attack as an excuse for the so-called Patriot Act, which approved mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, expanded wiretapping and roundups of terrorist “sympathizers” and holding them indefinitely without charges. It also provided the excuse for unjust wars against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
An excuse to attack democracy
Meanwhile, breaking its promise at a post-attack D.C. press conference, the Chamber of Commerce condoned, if not aided, its Oklahoma affiliate wrapping itself in the flag and using the attack as an excuse to trash unions in the Sooner State via a right-to-work law.
In written statements and tweets, knowing the threat political violence represents to the interests of the people, union presidents joined in the condemnation of the assassination attempt on Trump. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond wished Trump a “speedy recovery,” offered condolences to other victims, and demanded “a swift, thorough investigation into what happened.
The AFL-CIO also warned against any potential use of the assassination attempt to attack democracy.
“We must also caution that in the days and weeks ahead, those who don’t respect our democracy may take the opportunity to use this disturbing event to divide Americans. Now is a time we should all come together to condemn violence and reaffirm our commitment to the peaceful debate and exchange of ideas that are a cornerstone of American democracy, “ Shuler and Redmond said.
In a statement issued Sunday, the Communist Party USA said that violence and terror “only serve the interests of the forces of hate and division.” The party said, “In these difficult times, we call on our members and friends to remain vigilant and resist provocation from any source as the country recovers from the aftermath of the shooting.”
Many were prompted to emphasize the need for effective gun control. Trump opposes gun control measures. “This is horrific: Political violence is never OK. Sadly, this again highlights the need for common sense gun safety measures,” AFT President Randi Weingarten tweeted.
“If you keep talking about the assassination attempt don’t you dare tell the kids who survive school shootings and their families to ‘just get over it,’” tweeted David Hogg, co-founder of the student-led group March For Our Lives. Hogg escaped a Florida school massacre during Trump’s prior term in office. “What happened today is unacceptable and what happens every day to kids who aren’t the president and don’t survive isn’t either.”
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