A man with a gun is not — and cannot be — in charge of our democracy. We are.
We must maintain the hope that a better future is possible — and do the work to get there.
I didn’t know how to start tonight’s newsletter.
I suspect I’m not alone to have that sort of feeling this weekend, however, so I decided to keep writing.
What happened at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday is horrible. The attempted assassination of a former president and candidate for the presidency is as anti-democratic a step that someone outside of power can take. It is unacceptable. Not only in and of itself — although it is that — but also because it further normalizes that unacceptable behavior.
It’s also true that I, personally, have been so numbed by the two-tier reality of America’s poisoned relationship with guns and America’s poisoned political discourse that I found myself unsettled most by the thing I didn’t feel: Surprise.
Our leaders made it easier for this to happen and more likely that it would happen. This is not something that has happened equally on both sides, either, despite the fact that we are all facing the consequences. Republican and conservative leaders have disproportionately coarsened our politics even as they worked to turn the Second Amendment into a battering ram that would stop efforts to stop guns.
One person — for unknown reasons at this point — thought it was his decision, and his decision alone, whether Trump should be elected president again.
It is not — and cannot be.
In the aftermath of this horror, however, we all must face the underlying realities present in the nation that led him to think that.
We must also maintain the hope that a better future is possible — and do the work to get there.
America’s obsession with guns made Saturday’s assassination attempt horrifyingly unsurprising. Republican leaders have pressed unceasingly for expanded gun rights and, with the help of the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, they have extended the reach of the Second Amendment dramatically — and possibly beyond repair.
The mild move to pull back from the one of the worst consequences of Justice Clarence Thomas’s Second Amendment jurisprudence1 — so that it didn’t protect those with domestic violence restraining orders out against them — was offset by a new Thomas opinion ending the bump stock ban that the Trump administration advanced after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 and injured hundreds.
President Biden is heading to Las Vegas on Monday. He should give a public address putting forward legislative and executive options to restore the bump stock ban and take additional steps that would fortify protections against gun violence.
Biden should also make clear that if the Supreme Court will not reject inevitable challenges to reasonable regulations, then amending the Constitution to protect Americans is not off the table.
Saturday’s assassination attempt also felt horrifyingly unsurprising in light of our broken political discourse. We have never been an unblemished country on this front. We have a long history of political violence, including violence against presidents, and in that sense this was not new. It is, however, the closest America has come to an assassination of a president or presidential candidate in more than 40 years. Why now?
Prominent figures on the right quite literally dehumanize people who disagree with them — with Jack Posobiec recently referring to such people as “un-humans” — while others indirectly call for their execution — with Elon Musk recently stating that members of Congress not co-sponsoring a performative anti-immigrant bill from the right should face treason charges and the corresponding penalty.
Trump himself is obviously a part of the problem. His coarseness and hate has been a mainstay of his political presence from long before he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president the first time by attacking immigrants. The spirit he unleashed was perhaps most famously captured by Adam Serwer in his essay, “The Cruelty is the Point.”
It is true that everyone goes too far at times — although it is, generally, those with the power and, historically, the straight, cis white men who can and did do something about it. And, Biden is right to call on everyone to “take a step back, take stock of where we are, [and] how we go forward from here.”
If you do so, and do so honestly, it is horrifying where we are at.
That does not, in any way, mean that everyone goes as far as often. It is simply an acknowledgement that we all fall short — even of our own ideals — sometimes. I know I do.
It is also not bad for us to contemplate such things.
I hold out hope.
I found myself this weekend thinking back to the late summer of 2020. Things were not good. The pandemic was raging; the vaccine was not yet here. Breonna Taylor and George Floyd had been killed; they would not come back. The general election was heating up; Trump continued pushing forward.
And yet, there were glimmers of hope and even people-powered miracles. There were signs of communities rising up to protect themselves in the midst of pandemic. Support for mutual aid — both in an organized sense and in a “does my neighbor need something in this moment?” sense — was growing.
The uprisings that followed the killings of Taylor and Floyd brought attention to the desperate need to reform our criminal legal system — a focus of mine in law school, in journalism, and in advocacy. It was a moment of opening minds and expanding possibilities.
The election itself felt existential and yet disconnected to me, likely a function of the ongoing pandemic — as I imagine was a widely shared view — but then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Trump nominated then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett to take her place.
Everything felt more real — and more fragile. Because it was.
We had to face that reality and move forward.
I remain disturbed over the ways in which we have failed to take lessons to heart — let alone to policy — from the pandemic or from that all-too-brief “reckoning” with our criminal legal system. And the fallout from Ginsburg’s death still haunts us. But, I also know that people continue working to improve our lives and that their miracles continue to happen — even when I don’t see them.
I hold out hope for us in the long term because of that and that earlier moment. We have the capacity to imagine a better world, a better country, better states, better cities, better communities, better lives. There are people working for those things daily. With all of their being.
I don’t think reckoning is ever bad when your vision is just. The important thing is that there is follow-through to share that vision and turn it into reality.
Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then to put himself above the law and his allies’ plan to overhaul the federal government to further remove accountability and consolidate power in a second Trump term are facts. They are inconvenient facts for Trump and his hard-core supporters, but they are facts.
The election is 113 days away, and voting starts long before then.
Everything feels more real tonight — and more fragile. Because it is.
What happened on Saturday, an attempted assassination of Trump, is horrifying. That is not — and cannot be — the path that anyone in our politics takes. For any reason.
Everyone who doesn’t want to see a second Trump administration has to get to work ensuring that enough voters understand the stakes. And that we make the right choice.
We all make this decision with our vote — not one man with a gun.
It was George W. Bush’s former solicitor general, Paul Clement, who left his BigLaw partnership to start his own firm the day Thomas issued that opinion — because that firm, Kirkland & Ellis, announced it would no longer represent gun groups. Clement decided that being able to continue that representation was more important to him.
It is sad. How these comments have gone off the rails. If this thoughtful essay can trigger such vitriol we are in even worse shape than I thought.
Political violence is never a solution.