If anyone actually believed that Donald Trump was ever, even for a moment, serious about lowering the temperature of our deeply divided, anger-driven, hyperpolarized politics, that had to come to a crashing end once Trump chose fire-breathing J.D. Vance to be his running mate.
We’ll see what Trump says Thursday when he accepts the GOP nomination, his third such nomination in eight years from a party he has remade and now thoroughly dominates. He is calling it a unity speech — one that was rewritten after the horrific assassination attempt in order, he said, to bring people together — but it’s fair to guess that any attempt at unity will be on his terms.
In any case, there’s what Trump says and what he does. And what he did was choose Vance, who immediately after the assassination attempt blamed Joe Biden for the attack.
Of course, he did.
It was either a complete misreading by Vance of the moment when all Americans should have banded together against political violence and been thankful that Trump survived the attack. Or it was just a reminder of who Vance is — and who Trump wanted for the job.
As a reminder of who Vance is, there’s this: Back in 2016, when he was a solid Never Trumper, he compared Trump to Hitler in a text, saying he wasn’t sure whether “Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” And that was just the worst of what he said privately. He said much more publicly.
Now he’s a Trump loyalist who directs his ugly rhetoric toward Biden or any other convenient target. He’s also a 39-year-old right-wing ideologue who says he doesn’t really care what happens to Ukraine and who would gladly deliver Project 2025 — the radical Heritage Foundation document that Trump is now trying to disavow — to our doorstep if he could.
Project 2025 is the real GOP platform, and not the phony GOP platform basically dictated by Trump, complete with trademark Capital Letters, as if to Accentuate the Absurdity of it all.
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Meanwhile, Vance’s presence on the ticket is meant to signal a possible MAGA successor, if, that is, Trump were ever to step aside.
Here’s Vance’s blame-Biden tweet, with which Trump and his MAGA team apparently took no issue:
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all cost. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
That didn’t quite meet the Marjorie Taylor Greene standard. She said the “pedophile” Democrats “yesterday tried to murder President Trump.” On the other hand, MTG is no one’s idea of a vice president, not even Don Jr.’s.
But there’s so much wrong in Vance’s tweet, starting with the notion that the would-be assassin was intent on stopping authoritarian fascism. Days later, we still have no idea of the shooter’s motive. We know he was a 20-year-old loner who registered as a Republican but who once gave $15 to a liberal get-out-the-vote group.
It’s more likely the essence of this story lies at the intersection where a disturbed young man meets up with easy access to dangerous weapons — in this case, as it often is, an AR-15-style semiautomatic. As one writer put it, we should be glad that the shooter didn’t take advantage of the Supreme Court ruling legalizing bump stocks.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
The thing we can be most thankful for is that the shooter wasn’t a better shot.
But Vance was right that a central premise of Biden’s campaign is to call out Trump as a would-be dictator and an existential threat to democracy.
What he got wrong is that there is, in fact, a dire need for Biden and others to remind voters of the danger of a Trump restoration. And Biden, even as he’s struggling with those members of his party who want him to step aside, must continue to press that case.
It’s not the easiest thing to do at this moment. Biden canceled political events, took down political ads, in respect for the serious nature of what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. He would give a speech, one of several since the shooting, saying, “Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, God forbid, a literal killing field.”
The shooting leaves us with the image of Trump rising from the stage floor, blood streaming from his ear, Secret Service agents surrounding him against further threat, raising a clenched fist and yelling “Fight, fight, fight,” — an image that thrilled his followers. When Trump walked into the convention Monday night with his bandaged ear, the place was electric.
That night, speaker after speaker, some holding the now iconic photo, said that only divine intervention had saved Trump — as if their God had somehow decided to save Trump but not Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who died protecting his family. Obviously, they couldn’t have meant it that way.
David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter turned Never Trumper, put the difficulty best in an article in the Atlantic:
“Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
As Frum and others have pointed out, Trump embraces violent rhetoric and, as we know from January 6, even violence itself.
Trump calls his opponents thugs, says those “others” are “vermin” who will “poison the blood” of our country. He mocks the hammer assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He mocks Gretchen Whitmer after the foiled kidnap plot.
Turn down the heat?
And not only did he engage in the January 6 insurrection — as the Colorado Supreme Court once determined — Trump has since praised the participants, calling them patriots and hostages and promising them pardons.
A friend asked me the other day if this time of volatility reminded me of the ’60s. I joked that the music was far better, but it was also different in many other ways.
There was a war. Cities were burned down. There were three assassinations. There was a country divided along generational lines, along socioeconomic lines. A president stepped down. There were large protests, and violent police response, at the Democratic National Convention.
But at the same time, the civil rights movement made great strides, women’s rights were beginning to take hold, gay rights. There was Woodstock. In that period of instability and volatility, there was also optimism.
I guess that optimism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But right now, I can’t see any at all.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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