Assassination Attempt Effects?
Caution about making too many assumptions.
In furtherance of much of what James Joyner noted yesterday, let me add Derek Thompson’s admonition in The Atlantic: Stop Pretending You Know How This Will End.
Let me offer another interpretation of Saturday’s shocking event: Nobody knows anything. Anyone who claims to have already figured out precisely how Trump’s bloody ear will influence the 2024 election or strain the nation’s civic bonds is lying to you and to themselves. The history of failed assassination attempts in the United States and abroad offers only the murkiest indication of the path forward. “Would-be assassins are chaos agents more than agents that direct the course of history,” says Benjamin Jones, an economist at Northwestern University who has studied the effects of political assassination attempts over the past 150 years. These liminal figures—light-years from fame, yet inches from infamy—tend to change the world in minuscule ways, if they change anything at all.
The piece is worth a read in full.
But let me add something else. After Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Virginia Tech, Pulse, Uvalde, etc. there was always an immediate cry that this time it would finally make a difference. This time the violence would be so graphic and awful that people would change their minds about guns. And yet…
The country is highly polarized. The polls barely move no matter what happens (again, compare the polling to the pundit freak-out over Biden’s debate performance). Most people have made up their minds.
But moreover I think that the mass shooting cycle seems the appropriate framing here because, at least to this point, the narrative of the Trump assassination attempt feels eerily like mass-shooting event we have seen. There is no deep conspiracy. The shooter was a troubled loner. There are recriminations in the air that law enforcement is at fault. There is immediate shock and emotion. Pro-gun folks don’t want to hear anything about how easy access to very deadly weapons has any part to play in these things and anti-gun folks note that it clearly does.
Yes, Trump will sell t-shirt of that photo. Yes, he will use it to pump up his crowds (crowds that would have been there anyway). But how many people will decide that this was the incident to get them to vote Trump? But also, how many will be afraid of an emboldened Trump and vote Biden? I can see argument for the event driving turnout for both. We really don’t know.
I know that this is a close race and issues at the margins can matter. But there are so many variable that can matter at the margins between now and November, that even this weekend’s drama cannot be seen as being pivotal.
To quote Daniel Drezner again (James did in the linked post above):
Anyone claiming that this is it, the 2024 presidential election is over because “the assassination attempt will turbocharge the persecution narrative Trump has placed at the center of his campaign” should not be allowed to write any more U.S. coverage without first taking at least three semesters of undergraduate American politics courses. Remember when Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies? That was 45 days ago. In the next week we will learn who Trump chose as his vice presidential nominee. More debates about Biden’s age will rage on. Maybe this proves to be an inflection point, but it seems far more likely it’s a blip.
We just spent a week-plus debating Biden’s age and debate performance. Now the chattering class will debate the assassination attempt. God only knows what is next.
Above from the Atlantic. AOC responded to that right way, said the guy should resign his seat, make way for someone else if that’s his attitude, the last thing the Dems need is quitters,
To this point I think it’s helpful to look at how the last example of spectacular political violence at the National level, January 6th, has ultimately resulted in little-to-no discernable political shift.
I suspect that with the current sorting everything is already built in.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the way that hardcore political junkies, who have lived through numerous elections they’ve paid obsessive attention to on a daily basis, continue to allow themselves to get caught up in the news cycle of the moment. It’s a lesson they never learn, maybe because it’s too fun not to learn it.
I agree with this analysis. I want to see actual polls taken entirely post-ear. It certainly wasn’t good for Democrats, but random events tend not to yield predictable linear results.
@mattbernius: I meant to include 1/6 and yet…I forgot.
@Michael Reynolds: I expect he will get a sympathy bump (but it will be hard to disaggregate that from the convention bump that normally occurs).
It will then recede and will be on to the next thing.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s going to be hard to separate any effects it may have (short-term or otherwise) from the convention or the announcement of Vance. There’s a window between those events, but I doubt there’s going to be enough polling in that window to be able to make any definitive judgments.
People are too well conditioned by fiction, especially movies and TV, where One Big Event determines the One Big Outcome.
People are fatalistic for realistic reasons. I can’t imagine anyone being enthused by Biden’s chances. The fact that his defenders sounded the same as Trump’s defenders when confronted with the objective fact of his age and decline did not help, I’m guessing. And with the shooting, the obvious question is that if Biden were tackled like that, would he be able to get up?
Looking past the election, a victory for Trump is going to be filled with score-settling and rage, and no one knows how far that will go. You can say that January 6th has been a blip on a national scale, but Trump supporters have not forgotten how they were perceived. Much of their rage comes from looking like trash. These people are the most judgmental people on earth and they ended up rioting and storming the capital after they lost an election.
It’s the same story with JD Vance. Goes to Yale, and wants to better than everybody and certainly not like the white trash he grew up around, and hated. Guess what? Turns out he isn’t. He taps that rage and puts a NPR-like face on it and there’s his political career. Overall, with a Trump victory the best we can hope for is MAGA’s inherent incompetence running everything into the ground for our entertainment.
And with the election, same thing. As of today, the GOP believes they have already won the election, and so maybe their overconfidence will change things. I just don’t see Biden and his campaign doing anything to change the numbers.
@Modulo Myself:
Tell me you don’t spend quality time around black folk without telling me you don’t spend quality time around black folks.
@charontwo:
She’s been impressive lately. She speaks many of us, lacking patience for the weak, doomy-gloomy mindset of “unnamed Democrats” too cowardly to attach their real identities to their Red Wave 2022!!11! defeatism that was wrong then — and is still wrong now.
@Kathy:
And that way of understanding elections is written into the history books. For example, how many times have you heard that Dukakis lost because he posed in a tank? The way they tell it, the impact that one photo had on that election is some kind of scientific fact, when in reality it isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s a story. It’s hard for people who have been fed these hi-stories all their lives to escape the assumptions that go into them.
@Kathy: It also reflects the Great Man theory of history.
@Kylopod: And the press narrative.
There’s too many people who think something’s sus about this for it to be the game changer the GOP hopes for and Dems dread. Beyond questions of WTF SS and police?!?, Trump’s action immediately afterwards and right now make it look….. well, staged. The fist pump, the artful posing at the cost of exposing the head of someone just shot there, zero conservatives calling for people to chill out so there’s no further violence unless their counterparts, the lack of medical updates/knowledge or bothering to go visit/call the families, the press release saying nobody better leak or they’re fired – all of these could make the most innocent thing look fake due to their naked manipulations and lack of transparency. There’s just so many weird things that are being poorly explained away, attributed to divine intervention or just handwaved that’s causing non-Dems to ask questions too. Once the initial OMG faded, America is now looking at another shooting and going hmmmm, that’s…. not how it normally goes. Having primed America for conspiracy thinking, it’s no wonder that people are critically looking at this through that lens…. and boy, did he give them things to chew on. That the widow flat out said Biden called her but Trump didn’t is going to hurt him since that’s just an expected social courtesy in the land of mass shootings. A 5 min checkbox call and he can’t be bothered or isn’t in a state to do so and hiding it- prime ad material
It would be the most Trumpy thing ever to take the fantastic good fortune of surviving an assassination attempt with all it’s political, election-winning goodwill and squander it in 2 days by being the narcissist manipulator and general incompetent he is. This is political GOLD and other then raising money, doing nothing to cash in on it
@KM:
Starting with the Trump signs in his family’s yard.
“A Republican shot another Republican with a firearm only Republicans have fought to keep in widespread circulation. Here’s why that’s doom for Democrats or something.”
– The New York Slimes Editorial Board, probably.
@KM:
It’s struck me that Trump thinks small. He wants to be Putin, strong, in control, and one of the richest men in the world. Admittedly, he doesn’t have an opportunity like the breakup of the Soviet Union and sell-off of state owned companies to work with. But small scale grifts like holding a rally at his own Doral club seem to be the limit of his imagination. Not that I’m complaining that he’s self limited.
@DK:
Lmao, every black person I known is as fatalistic as me. They think we’re screwed. I’d be happy to be wrong. But the attitude coming off people like you is not reassuring to me. Yelling at people who have zero power in the scheme of things to turn that frown upside down is desperate and tacky, and it doesn’t build confidence.
@DK:
What the meme – “We’re not the tolerant Left. We’re the F*ck off and Die Left”? That’s AOC – she correctly identities many Dems are more in love with norms then democracy and will happily sacrifice it to be seen as the “adults in the room”
Sometimes in life, you gotta throw hands. Mentally, spiritually, politically, socially – you must fight for what is right or it will be taken from you. This is one of them. We are fighting against a rising global tide of fascist-leaning movements and there’s a good chance it can happen here. She’s pointing out a hard truth – Biden may not be perfect but he’s the guy to back or we’re screwed. Suck it up, stop pushing doubts on your own base and tell them all that matters in butts in voting booths. You can spend the next 4 years developing your backbench but now’s not the time to quibble. We have the numbers, we have the momentum so stop falling for pys-ops and crappy polls meant to drain you of morale.
@Kylopod:
Yeah, that too. People believe the narrative regardless of evidence.
Some hasty linguistics research suggests we should rename our species “Homo Fabulans,” or “human who tells stories.”
@Modulo Myself:
To the very privileged, even the mildest pushback back sounds like “yelling.”
Like the very fired up and ready to go crowd at this black church people like me are focused on doing the work necessary to defeat Trump’s all-male Project 2025 anti-abortion MAGA extremist ticket. There’s no time to sit around rocking evangelical defeatists in our arms, going “there, there” and stroking their hair. If reassurance is what dedicated doomers are looking for, maybe a tarot card reader would help. Idk
@Modulo Myself: This is just a guess, but I suspect that some amount of the training in Presidential protection duty involves teaching methods of tackling the President that involve being sure they don’t injure him more than the bullet might.
But I do share your disappointment that the Biden campaign didn’t come out with an instant response to the debate problem simultaneously in hundreds of mixed media markets overnight. I won’t vote for Democrats ever again because of that failure–and, of course, because I never voted for any before.
@KM:
Can you imagine if the cameras caught Biden sleeping at the DNC like Trump was at the RNC convention last night?
The hysterics.
The weeks of calls to step down.
The hundreds of think pieces.
The false equivalencies.
The false portrayal of tight polling three months out as catastrophic.
The tedious doom and gloom, buttressed with ‘All 1.5 black people I know share my views.’
And that would just be the Democrats and the “liberal” media.
@DK: What I find frustrating about the last few weeks of doom-and-gloom is that when/if Biden becomes the official nominee and heads into the general election, he’s now going to be forced to explain why members of his own party very publicly aired their doubts that he’s got the faculties to continue. Their argument, of course, is that they don’t believe he can beat Trump, so they’re doing their best to salvage the situation by pushing him off the ticket in favor of a candidate who can win. But this just comes off as a thin rationalization for essentially knifing themselves. It reminds me of the old third-party mantra–“There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties”–one of those flippant, reductive lies that people engage in when they want to pretend they’re not being stupidly counterproductive to the goals they claim to care about.
@Kylopod: Yes. A whole orgy of doomy gloomy stuff just for…Biden to still be running just slighty behind in public polling while slightly leading the 538 forecast. Big whoop. Imagine how the Biden-Harris ticket could be doing if Democrats tried, oh I dunno, supporting their candidate instead of helping to drive up his/her negatives. Wow, what a concept.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that JD “Trump is the American Hitler” Vance is now on the Republican ticket, and there’s reams of video and audio of him trashing rapist felon Trump, a goldmine for Democratic adsmakers.
Similarly high-profile Democrats mostly had the good sense to reject the F*** Joe Biden mass hysteria, at least publicly — leaving Republicans with material from only anonymous sources, backbencher congressional nobodies, out-of-touch pundits, and pompous celebrities.
That elitist crowd couldn’t persuade the Democratic base to swap the known knowns of the Biden risk for the unknown unknowns of the Harris risk, so I doubt it’s great fodder for ads targeting the unwashed masses.
You don’t see it do you? The theme from the selection and the convention is 2016/2020 Never-Trumpers moving to support Trump. Vance, Amber Rose, Sean O’Brian(Teamster president)….
And we have seen some come out openly for Trump since Saturday. I don’t think they “switched” but rather got off the fence or decided to go public with their support of Trump. How many that inspires is debatable.
But in this time of the parties transitioning that started in 2008, the Trump theme is “welcome to the party”
The Biden theme seems to be “How could you?” even consider Trump
@Kylopod: But remember, the “not a dime’s worth…” started with Huey Long who, iirc, was running against both Hoover and Roosevelt. The purpose of the old saw has evolved (devolved??) over the years.
@DK: They do have Carville as a go to though. Fortunately, he looks every wrinkle’s worth of his age, including the creaky, wavery old man voice.
@just nutha:
I believe it was George Wallace who first popularized the phrase in 1968. Also, Huey Long didn’t run against Hoover and Roosevelt, he planned to run in 1936 when FDR was running for reelection, but was assassinated before he got the opportunity.
Today’s Green Party may not use the exact phrase (which still carries the echoes of the Dixiecrats), but they have definitely expressed the sentiment, and it’s just as stupidly wrong.
@JKB:
So what. We will still be reminding voters that underqualified, anti-woman opportunist JD Vance called Trump the “American Hitler,” and that Trump’s Project 2025 anti-abortion ticket is extreme and unfit.
@JKB:
You can count on one hand (and have a few fingers and a thumb left over) the number of times that JKB has posted something I agree with, but this is one of them.
Religious movements welcome converts, and the more strident the opposition was before conversion the more prized the convert is after. Paul persecuted Christians before his Damascus Road experience, but not many Christians claim you can’t believe what he said in Second Corinthians (or, as our former president would have it, Two Corinthians) because he used to be an unbeliever. For Trumpers, the magnitude of the change is a strength, not a weakness.
I don’t worry about Vance’s effect on Trump supporters because they were going to support him no matter what. I am more concerned that, to the extent there really are any persuadable voters left, a pitch by Vance to the effect of “Yeah, I thought he was terrible til I got to know him and see him in action, and if you could see him up close like I have you’d change your mind about him, too” might resonate. Vance may not have any rival other than my own state’s Josh Hawley for the title “worst current senator,” and I hope there’s a way that Democrats make his selection blow up in Trump’s face, but I don’t think accusing him of hypocrisy because he used to say bad things about Trump is going to be the magic bullet some people on the left seem to think it is.
@Roger: I don’t know anyone on the left claiming JD Vance’s past statements about Trump are “a magic bullet.” As difficult as it apparently is for some to grasp, it’s actually possible for Democrats to highlight these statements as one relevant data point without believing that they’re some omnipotent magical MAGA-destroyer which must be focused on to the exclusion of anything else.
People can do more than one thing.
@DK:
If there’s video of Senator Weather vane calling the Convicted Felon “hitler,” it would be malpractice not to air it in a great many ads.
Another avenue is to contrast GQP rhetoric against the Biden administration, with how many of them, included Convicted Felon, brag about the results of Biden’s policies even though they voted against it. Like the Convicted Felon claiming credit for the reduction in the price of insulin that was part of Biden’s agenda.
That is, make it clear Biden’s policies are popular, but the GQP won’t continue them, just try to get credit for them.
And Biden should keep hammering away at the GQP’s position on abortion.
@Kathy:
Yup.
As you point out, yes, under the overall message of Democracy vs Dictatorship, the Biden campaign and Democratic-aligned groups can highlight Vance calling Trump America’s Hitler and also run ads on Biden’s achievements — and speak out on anti-abortion extremism, too.
Crazy, I know.
To me, the scariest people are those who have no beliefs, other than their own superiority. I have described Hawley that way. Vance fits as well. I also see Trump that way, but he has other advantages that Hawley and Vance do not.
In short, I think sincerity matters. However, I think it is easy to confuse sincerity and authenticity. Even more so if the latter is done with the flair of an entertainer.
But it probably doesn’t matter–VP likely does not move the needle much.
@KM:
I’m am not surprised to see Trump Assassin Truthers on the left. However, I did not expect conspiratorial skepticism from Matt Walsh and other grand poobahs of MAGAland, who themselves are now claiming the “official story” doesn’t add up.
Trump can’t fully capitalize if his biggest alt-media fanboys don’t buy the basic facts and start the ‘just asking questions’ game.
@Kurtz:
Although in this case it should. In my opinion, Trump’s health is cratering fast enough he is very unlikely to last anyway near 4 more years.
@DK: First time I’ve ever listened to Matt Walsh, for my opening comment. I’ll note that it seems to me that Walsh is tiptoeing around the notion that the “attempt” is at minimum, carelessness approved of by the current administration. My guess is that he’d like to say that it’s a false flag operation with a Dem “operative” hired to register as a Republican and keep zero profile up to the attack but can’t bring himself to say it, if only because Trump seems to have selected his own protection team.
That’s my “no dog in the fight” read, but my experience is that everybody is going to read whatever they want/need into whatever is said. Still, maybe I’m too cynical, jaded, and in the bag for the MAGAts to know what I was hearing. Hard to say.
@charontwo: Watching the Matt Walsh clip provided by DK is the first time I’ve heard Trump on the stump this time around. I’ll agree with you; he seems scary “not all there” to me and my ears. He sounded not very coherent, his diction seems to be failing, and it’s possible based on the pitch of his voice in the segment that I heard that he’s also starting to lose his hearing (I remember listening to Rush Limbaugh a couple of times after he acknowledged his hearing loss but before he got his cochlear implant and the comparison to Trump is stunning–neither one sounded like the person he’s been in the past).
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
My read of Walsh was pretty much the same. Except I thought he was less coherent than what you wrote — but then again, conspiracy talk makes my eyes glaze over.
@DK:
There’s no official “story” yet, which is what these types call the investigation(s). There are some facts released by the authorities, some of which may be wrong, and info gathered by news orgs, some of which also may be wrong.
This is like claiming the Moon landings are fake* when the Saturn V has just put Apollo 11 on Earth orbit.
*Spoiler alert: not fake.
@DK: Trump *fell asleep* during that screech-fest?
This does seem like it should be a bigger story, after all he is older.
@Roger: “I don’t think accusing him of hypocrisy because he used to say bad things about Trump is going to be the magic bullet some people on the left seem to think it is.”
No, but the clips where he says that women should be forced to stay in abusive marriages and that people who don’t have children shouldn’t be allowed to lead because they have no stake in the country might be…
@wr:
I don’t disagree with that. I think Vance is repulsive on almost every level, so I look forward to people learning more about him. My only real gripe (and I’ll concede that “magic bullet” may have been too strong) was seeing people suggesting that eight-year-old clips of Vance saying bad things about Trump were going to change a significant number of votes. I hope they do. I don’t think they will.
@Jen:
As Jimmy Kimmel said: it was past his jail time.
@Roger: Speaking for myself, I don’t expect Vance’s past positions to damage him with MAGAs.
I just don’t believe he is a real convert, even if they will treat him as such. To me, it is all just part of his hypocrisy and cynicism. He “converted” to win the Senate seat and he has parlayed it into the veep nomination.
@DK: My apologies to both you and the rest of the commentariat. I had no intention whatsoever of wanting to make Walsh sound intelligent, thoughtful, or reasonable. In a lot of ways, I could see why he’s just another Rush wannabe; say what you will, Limbaugh was never afraid of saying the covert stuff out loud. He was a big fan of the dog klaxon, the dog gong, the dog M-80 explosion (but all in good fun you understand, right?). No dog whistling or hinting for him. The modern guys are pansies by comparison.