Moment of Truth

Nothing has moved the needle much in our politics. Will an assassination attempt do it?

Before Saturday evening I had intended to write that the Republicans should see if they could get their deposit back on the Fiserv Forum and cancel their convention. There’s an old rule in politics that when your opponent is digging a hole for himself the last thing you want to do is take away his shovel.

And it looked like that was just what the GOP was getting ready to do this week: steal the headlines from the Democrats who were more than willing to see them go so that they could work through their family dispute in a little bit of privacy.

Then a gunman came within an inch of assassinating Donald Trump while he killed a man and seriously injured two others. That accomplished, tragically, what I had thought would have been done through the normal course events. I yearn for the normal course of events.

So, now with Biden’s age issues on the back burner, all eyes are on Trump and the Republicans and how they react to the events in Pennsylvania. Is this the thing that brings us back to our senses or will it be just another event used to excite the base?

There is at least a glimmer of hope that it might be the former. Soon after the shooting, Melania Trump Tweeted, “beyond the red and the blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together.”

And now Trump himself has said that he is reworking his convention speech to take a more unifying tone. He’s famous for changing directions at the last minute and for ad libbing, so we’ll have to wait and see. His speech won’t happen until Thursday. He’s also surrounded by people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, none of whom will be mistaken for Mother Teresa.

It seems more likely that the party will revert to the line taken by J.D. Vance. Shortly after the shooting, Vance wrote on X: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

This horrible event doesn’t change the facts, doesn’t change who Trump is. Biden was correct to point up the threat that Trump represents because there’s ample evidence of it. But I would expect that Biden will tamp down his own rhetoric, at least for a time, in response to this.

If we lived in a saner time this would be an opportunity for us to try to understand the other side better. I’ve often pointed out that in my own neighborhood, which went 90% for Biden, I hear far too much disdain for Trump voters. Well, I know some Trump voters, and I know them to be good people. I can’t quite square that with their support for Trump, but there it is. Similarly, I know there are plenty of Trump supporters who despise my side without knowing any of us personally. When you don’t know anybody on the other side it’s easy to demonize them.

A poll taken last year found that Americans overwhelmingly share the same values, but don’t see their political opposites as sharing them. To quote the AP story on the poll results:

“For example, while 91% of Republicans said they think it’s very or extremely important that citizens should learn from the past to improve the country, only about a third of Democrats said they believed that to be true of GOP voters. And while only 31% of Republicans say Democrats believe government accountability is very or extremely important, 90% of Democratic respondents said they do.

“The findings reflect a phenomenon known as “affective polarization,” in which disagreements are based on animosity and a lack of trust instead of an actual debate over values or policy. Julia Minson, a professor who studies conflict and collaboration at Harvard University’s Harvard Kennedy School, said recognizing common values is a good start to bridging America’s divides.”

If there was anything good that might have come of this it would have been the recognition that we need to simply try to see things from the other’s point of view. Not to adopt that view or to support their candidates, but to just try to understand why they see things as they do. To give each other the benefit of a doubt.

I still hold out some slim hope that we might come to that conclusion.