As a nation, America is awash in blood, but not only for politicians but also for hundreds of everyday citizens victims of domestic violence, street gangs, urban warfare, not to mention the killings at Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Doulgas High School, and Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas, and Highland Park Illinois, to name but a few of mass killings.
The image of a bloodied Trump, after a bullet pierced his ear, has now become an iconic image and cements his stature as a martyr, and one that he has always portrayed himself as, if not a victim.
Taking a step back we have to remember that he has told so many lies about the mundane, for example how many people showed up at his inauguration, claiming more than that of Barack Obama, to embracing the deep state conspiracy, aided by such figures as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that Mexico was sending rapists to American shores, ostensibly as immigrants; migrants being put up in luxury hotels by New York city administration officials, to the dangerous, that ingesting bleach could “cure” the Covid virus.
The fact that so many people have embraced these lies, and the very danger that has incited people to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th speaks volumes of what has become the Big Lie, that Joe Biden was not the lawfully elected president of the United States.
The rhetoric, along with the lies that has been so incendiary it’s frightening to hear people say that the off the cuff remark by Biden that he had Trump in his target like a bullseye, and that helped fuel the gunman that fired off rounds in rural Western Pennsylvania is incalculably false.
Facing the inherent danger of falsehoods now gives rise to sympathy for the shooting, but it will soon be back to the accusations, and the grandstanding that has become part of not simply American politicking, but the 21st century tenor of life in America.
The incendiary comments of Trump, now aided by his vice presidential candidate JD Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, whose earlier remarks blaming Democrats for the shooting (along with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) has fueled the falsehoods Trump, and who are now making statements to turn down the political rhetoric seems ironic.
Vance said on social media, “The central promise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” and “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Against this background was, and which may possibly resurface, the media driven attempt to get Biden to stand down as a candidate for the November election, and to find someone younger, and possibly dynamic, from the ranks of younger lawmakers, and while we’ve noted the difficult of vetting presidential candidates, most of whom have never faced such close scrutiny, and among them is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer herself the target of a far right wing group planning to kidnap her, and who held Trump as a hero.
The threat of a brokered convention in Chicago, is about as concerning as it is for a repeat of the violent suppression of demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention, in an already overheated atmosphere that again could possibly be violent.
What is now seen are two elders battling it out for a change, or a sustained democracy, and one not only of the values espoused or the future of the nation, but its soul.
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