According to the latest reports,
the shooter who injured several people at a Congressional baseball practice
yesterday, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, was obsessed with the
idea that Donald Trump, along with the Republican Party, was working to
undermine American democracy and posed an existential threat to the future of
the nation.
If that sort of reasoning sounds
familiar, it’s because themes like that—painting Trump as an “illegitimate
president” who must be removed from office, by any means necessary—have been a
major part of “the Resistance” since Inauguration Day.
To be honest, it is a miracle that more
attacks like the one yesterday have not occurred more frequently in recent
years, as polarization and political anger has reached a fever pitch. The last
national political figure to be targeted in such a manner was Congresswoman
Gabby Giffords in 2011. Before that, to my knowledge, it had been several
decades since a federal officeholder had been injured or killed in an act of
political violence. Thinking about all of the overheated rhetoric of just the
past few months, culminating most recently in the Kathy Griffin controversy and the staging of a modern interpretation of the play Julius
Caesar, which featured the assassination of a Trump lookalike, not to
mention the numerous threats on the lives of various members of Congress, it is
remarkable that actual violence against public servants, of the sort that
occurred yesterday, is still so rare.
Hopefully, if nothing else, this episode
will serve as a wakeup call for those who traffic in such perverse acts as mock
assassinations and rationalizations of political violence, that their actions
can have consequences. May Steve Scalise and the others injured be the last to
pay this price.
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