“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” Mr. Trump wrote Sunday on social media. “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win.”
In short, this brush with individual mortality and national calamity is an unsought, but golden, opportunity for Mr. Trump to help cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction. It offers him a chance to show that there is a more constructive path.
This responsibility is not Mr. Trump’s alone. Every participant in our civic life needs to conduct some soul-searching. The motives of the gunman in Butler, Pa., remain unknown as we write. That they were so plausibly political, though, should prompt deeper reconsideration. Speech and conduct once considered unthinkably uncivil have grown routine: We live in a country where protesters harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes, shouting obscenities. Universities have become battlegrounds. And outright physical violence has become a bipartisan hazard — as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and the husband of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can attest. Ordinary citizens get caught in the mayhem — or, in the case of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, who lost his life protecting his family from bullets Saturday, extraordinary ones.
In a statement of her own, former first lady Melania Trump appealed to our common humanity. “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion,” she wrote. Ms. Trump is correct that there’s too much vilification and dehumanization in politics, though it must be acknowledged that her husband is responsible for referring to fellow citizens as “traitors” who “hate America.”
Democrats, too, need to recalibrate their rhetoric. “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s eye,” Mr. Biden said on Monday in remarks to a group of campaign donors. He struck an appropriate tone on Sunday: “Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is more important than that right now,” he wrote on X.
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and in contrast to the many bipartisan calls for calm and unity, threat-exaggeraters on the right included, lamentably, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), reportedly under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, who quickly posted on X that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the assassination attempt. Vivek Ramaswamy, a surrogate for Mr. Trump, said the shooting “wasn’t totally a shock”: “First they sued him. Then they prosecuted him. Then they tried to take him off the ballot.”
Beware of anyone who constructs such sentences around the word “they.” At their national convention in Milwaukee this week, Republicans will get the microphone in prime time to reach voters who have felt unhappy with their choices in the 2024 election. Indeed, they’ll have the national stage to themselves: Democrats wisely have paused their campaign advertising in an effort at modulation. Modulation is precisely what Mr. Trump and the GOP ought to reciprocate.
Perhaps the assassin’s failure was providential, as so many have suggested. Mr. Trump’s murder could have plunged the United States into political darkness. Now all Americans have been given a chance to turn toward the light.
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