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.
