Too soon?
The United States, land of the Second Amendment, of the constitutional right to bear arms, including in most states, military-grade assault rifles, where the most powerful political lobby group in the land is openly and proudly dedicated to the proposition that you will only take their gun from their dead, cold hands; the land of Presidential assassinations—“well, it’s one way to get rid of them,” as Gore Vidal once purred—of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the land of Sandy Hook and Columbine High, of Majorie Stoneham Douglas High and other schools and shopping centres beyond account; the land of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, of the Boston Marathon bombing, of Centennial Park and the Pittsburgh Synagogue; the land of literal slavery and a War of Independence and a Civil War to boot, whose legally enforced post-war practice of the segregation of blacks and whites was the literal inspiration for Nazi Germany’s ghettoisation of Jews (look it up); the land of lynchings and church bombings, and a foreign policy that has reached into every continent on earth and that is currently supplying weapons and other armaments to the genocide-adjacent activities of the Israeli government, yes, that United States, the very same one, that one, is currently in the throes of trying to convince us, or themselves, that violence should have no part in their politics.
This is not really them, apparently.
We are meant to understand that the failed assassination attempt on the most disgusting candidate their corrupted system of democracy has ever thrown up, the convicted felon, probable paedophile, convicted rapist, business shyster and instigator of a coup that almost overthrew the 2020 election, the big guy in the red hat who has effortlessly taken over the major conservative party in the land, we are meant to understand that the attempted assassination of that guy was an aberration rather than a distillation of some pure essence of the country’s politics.
This is all too beautiful for words.
At least Republican Majorie Taylor Greene—an actual elected Congressperson and not at all someone I made up, as if any of us could make her up—at least she is taking it well.
I have seen any number of references to the Reichstag Fire in the last few days, the act of terrorism that consolidated Nazi authoritarianism in Germany in 1933, and it is a fair comparison, as long as we understand the nature of the resonances between that event and the Donald’s aural encounter with lead the other day. Let me quote from Volcker Ullrich’s recent, immense biography of Hitler:
The question of who was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag has prompted a decades-long debate that has never been resolved. Because the event was so useful to the National Socialists, suspicions arose immediately that the Nazis themselves had started the fire. Conversely, the Nazi leadership did not waste any time at all in blaming the KPD, although not a shred of evidence was presented. The most likely explanation is the one first advanced by Fritz Tobias in the early 1960s that the Dutch Communist revolutionary Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested at the scene, acted on his own, without anyone pulling the strings behind him. But there is no way of being certain, and there probably never will be. In any case, more important than continuing debates about whether van der Lubbe was the sole arsonist is what sort of advantages the National Socialists derived from the Reichstag fire. (emphasis added)
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (pp. 549-550). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Let me add this bit so you get the full flavour of what was going on:
…Hitler [did not] restrain himself in the company of Franz von Papen, who had hurried to the Reichstag from the Gentlemen’s Club, where he had been dining with Hindenburg. ‘This is a sign from God, Herr Vice-Chancellor!’ Hitler told him. ‘If this fire is, as I believe, the work of Communists, we will have to crush this deadly pestilence with an iron fist!’ It is difficult to say whether Hitler and his paladins became victims of their own propaganda and truly believed that the Communists were behind the act of arson. But it is beyond doubt that the Nazis were not at all unhappy about the Reichstag fire. On the contrary, it was a welcome excuse to strike a decisive blow against the KPD (the Communists). Later that evening, when the Nazi leadership assembled in the Hotel Kaiserhof, the mood was positively relaxed. ‘Everyone was beaming’, Goebbels noted [in his diary]. ‘This was just what we needed. Now we’re completely in the clear.’
(p. 551).
Many of the geniuses who have uncritically elevated Trump to where he is now, as an almost untouchable fixture on the American political landscape—no matter what filth he vomits or crimes he commits—are now telling us that this escape from execution all-but guarantees Trump’s re-election in November this year.
They are loving it. They can’t speak highly enough of Trump’s Reichstaggish genius.
As the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade, let’s turn to what the author of “Notes on Antisemitism” says in his account of Hitler and co, that “Nazism signaled not so much the end of reason but the application of reason to its own presuppositions…”
That’s where we may well be with Trump, at the logical outcome of all that has gone before, rather than its negation.
If this act of violence is, in fact, the final benediction that washes away any misgivings undecided or, until now, uninspired voters, may have had about this gruesome candidate; if this is what gets out the vote and makes his re-election a certainty, as so many pundits are currently predicting; if this act of violence and the performative, yobbo fist-pumping that has accompanied it is in fact the turning point, then we should be prepared for an even worse outcome than what the most pessimistic of commentators have been predicting thus far.
I still hold out hope that the opposite might yet come to pass.
Yes but....
Hitler ushered in a thousand year Reich but it did not take long to begin to unravel. True its decline was accelerated by military defeat. A Trump presidency would, in the short term, be an unmitigated disaster but it will also unravel. The problem for the MAGA Republicans is that they do not have any constructive policies. I suspect that all that they will succeed in doing is to destroy America as a viable democratic state.
Subverting my expectations using that title but then not ending the opening paragraph calling the United States "Goofy"