Shooting part of traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow

In an informal, unscientific survey after former President Trump apparently got part of his ear shot off in Butler, Pennsylvania, roughly half of my friends and neighbors acknowledged believing – at least initially – that the shooting had been a staged campaign event. Given made-to-order photographs of the event taken by mainstream news media of Trump – face bloodied, fist raised defiantly as Secret Service agents rushed him offstage to a waiting vehicle, a U.S. flag soaring overhead heavenlike – who in our doubting world wouldn’t wonder as much?

Lest Trump supporters erupt in indignant outrage that anyone believe this was anything but an outright assassination attempt, remember: For more than three years, Americans have been pressed almost daily by Trump and his sycophants to believe the storming of the U.S. Capitol, complete with attacks on police officers, was a plot provoked by disguised antifa activists and choreographed by the FBI to embarrass and undermine President Trump. A few days after the July 13 assassination attempt, Trump again touted January 6 as a “hoax” in a social-media post.

I was making Saturday night dinner when my wife said Trump, 78, had been shot at one of his campaign rallies. As a lifelong newsman, I ordinarily would have rushed to my iPad or TV to confirm this; as a retired newsman living in the propagandistic, conspiracy-ridden, “truth-isn’t-truth” Age of Trump, I instead wearily suggested my wife consult reliable Washington Post or CBS News websites to ensure such an event had taken place – and that, in any case, dinner was ready. Only a few hours later had I sufficiently galvanized myself to return to the murky depths of Trump’s America.

One reason for skepticism: To experience a Trump rally as I have is to witness several hours of delusion, anger, even torment. Wonder why most people in the risers behind Trump didn’t flee when shots rang out? By then, many had spent hours outside baking in the July sun, often without easy access to water. Some had passed out from heat exhaustion. When cognizant, they listened to a stream of incendiary, overripe warmup speakers whipping them into a dizzying frenzy of victimhood and resentment. By the time gunfire erupted, they were too weak and too transfixed to run for their lives.

In short, the shooting seemed part of the traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow where Americans are invited to view themselves in a funhouse mirror of whacky distortions and the carnival barker-in-chief will say anything and everything – often to the point of babbling, and just as incoherently as our sitting president but without the latter’s bowing to certain standards of conduct. If you study the faces of the crowd behind Trump whenever he says something utterly absurd, trips over a spoken gaffe or collapses into garble at rallies, there’s no flash of realization anything is amiss. The lights at home are out.

When a friend who voted twice for Trump raised the assassination attempt the other day, he focused our conversation on ballistics, logistics and security contingency planning. Not once did he express surprise or horror that someone had tried to blow Trump’s head off. Nor did my friend once hint that this must have been some leftist or government plot to assassinate Trump. Our conversation reminded me of my own conclusion the evening of the shooting: If you regularly blow things up and you’re indiscriminate in how you blow things up, don’t be surprised if one day it all blows up in your face.

Trump’s champions in Congress and right-wing media accuse mainstream media and Democrats of inciting violence against Trump by alleging that Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and Project 2025 reek of unadulterated fascism. Yet Trump and his followers show no hesitation in recklessly vilifying others as “socialists” and “communists.” When I walked onto the grounds of the Trump rally at Waco Regional Airport the morning of March 25, 2023, one of the first oversized banners I saw declared: “DEMOCRATS ARE COMMUNISTS,” complete with hammer and sickle.

So why is turnabout not fair play? Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” for decades. Are Democrats not entitled to claim Republicans are fascists, particularly if they (and a great number of moderates and conservatives) believe it so? Project 2025 reimagines America under a super-presidency largely unchecked by courts or Congress; replacement of millions of non-partisan civil service employees with Trump toadies who could bungle everything from Medicare to federal disaster relief to Social Security payments; and a military leadership more loyal to the president than the U.S. Constitution.

And talk of incendiary: Even now, Trump stokes violence by continually insisting, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Yet some 60 lawsuits alleging this failed in the courts. And despite claims to the contrary, about half of the hearings were evidentiary. To quote several elder Republican statesmen who refuted Trump’s charges in 2022: "Claims that an election was stolen or that the outcome resulted from fraud are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy."

In fact, these hardline Republicans of yesteryear who investigated Trump’s allegations (including former federal judge Michael Luttig and Bush v. Gore election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg) declare in their “Lost, Not Stolen” report: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

Consider, too, the numerous pleas for leniency from many January 6 rioters, insurrectionists and camp followers in federal district court who now blame Trump for inciting the violence.

Recent example: East Texan Alex Harkrider, 36, a Marine veteran convicted of running rampant with a tomahawk at the Capitol. "False claims by President Trump that the election was rigged were made on media sources as well as by the president himself that the election system had been corrupted and that the integrity of the election should be questioned," Harkrider’s attorney argued. "Trump refused to concede. He showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process and in time managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner."

Not that this is the only outcome for January 6 dupes. When Tyler Dykes, 26, was sentenced to almost five years in prison this month for assaulting law enforcement as an active-duty Marine on the Sixth, he demonstrated the extremes of defiance deemed acceptable in the Trump ranks. He talked about the unrivaled adrenaline rush he experienced at the Capitol, eclipsing even (he claimed) bungee jumping, and offered in court his unqualified endorsement of Trump for president in 2024. Dykes has already served time for participating in the racist “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump apologists now demand we at least show decency and deference to Trump after the shooting. But for a tilt of the head, he might have been killed. Yet the former president mocked the hammer attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband (and the MAGA crowd laughed); dismissed a very real plot to kidnap a Democratic governor as “fake”; hinted that Second Amendment advocates might want to do something about 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton; and has vowed to pardon January 6 rioters, many of whom roamed Capitol corridors screaming for the blood of Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence.

A Pew Research Center survey this year found nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats believe politicians should be able to express themselves with aggressive or heated language without worrying about the consequences. A day before the Waco rally kicked off his 2024 reelection bid, the former president vented over the prosecution case against him involving hush payments to a porn star. Trump warned of “death and destruction” if the case was allowed to proceed. Rallygoers with whom I spoke the very next day were divided over whether such threatening language was appropriate.

General consensus: “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.”

During the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump declared: “The election result [of 2020], we're never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.” Does Trump mean he’ll engage in more behind-the-scenes skullduggery to siphon votes his way (which he clearly attempted in 2020) or does he threaten more post-election violence? When Ted Koppel visited a Trump rally in Schnecksville, Penn., in April, some aging rallygoers signaled the latter. “Be ready, just be ready for war,” a burly white man with a “Second Amendment: God, Guns and Guts” cap told the 84-year-old veteran journalist.

Not even two weeks after the shooting, during a rally in Ohio, Republican state Sen. (and Boy Scout!) George Lang proved the Trump movement has learned nothing: “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind. And if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Smitty [Mark Smith] and the Bikers for Trump on our side.”

The crowd cheered.

A more recent University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats survey suggests that 7 percent of Americans – roughly 18 million adults – view violence as justifiable in restoring Trump to power. They also deem January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” Another 10 percent – some 26 million people – view violence as justifiable in preventing Trump from regaining the presidency. The Chicago Project’s work gauging political violence accelerated only after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of the 2020 presidential election.

What’s now really driving the MAGA crowd crazy is they can’t categorize the dead 20-year-old shooter as a card-carrying member of the left. He was reportedly a registered Republican and a gun enthusiast who left few indications of what spurred him to elude security, somehow scale a building on the rally’s outer perimeter and maintain his perch long enough to squeeze off several shots with an assault-styled rifle. British reporter Siobhan Kennedy reports the Trump 2024 campaign considered the shooter’s household in Bethel Park as one of the most sympathetic to Trump’s reelection in the neighborhood.

Investigation continues as conspiracy theories multiply, representing a frantic game of whack-a-mole for the legitimate press charged with timely fact-checking. It’s quite possible the shooter reflects the utter incoherence of a political movement driven less by ideology and integrity, more by idolatry and impulse. The fact the shooter’s cellphone revealed obsessions with both Trump and Biden and their schedules may well hint at how a bewildered, repulsed, up-and-coming generation in the Age of Trump perceives all of us “adults” who, whatever else, have been in charge of America for generations now.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors. This piece appeared in the Tribune-Herald on July 27.