Bryan Zepp Jamieson
July 28th, 2024
www.zeppscommentaries.online
This morning someone asked me if I was disappointed about the Trump assassination attempt. I would like to think he was just asking if I was disappointed because I had looked over the available evidence and concluded that Trump’s ear was in fact grazed by an AR-15 bullet and not, as previously suspected, a shard of glass from a teleprompter. Or he may have been asking if I was disappointed the assassin didn’t succeed. Like many Trump supporters, he has a very grim view of humanity, and likes to take umbrage against offenses, real and imagined. He’s still ranting about the Paris Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Something about Jesus on Mount Olympus, I don’t know.
I replied, “Not really. In fact I was thinking this morning that had Trump been assassinated, he would have quickly been replaced by a young vicious MAGA riding the wings of Trump’s ‘martyrdom.’ Against Joe Biden.
Instead, we have grumpy and deeply flawed weird old Trump up against Kamala Harris, and Trump has turned his own near death experience into a bad joke.”
We’re at a point where Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic candidate (she already has a supermajority of the delegates voting at the convention, so it is a done deal) and even more than the assassination attempt, more than Biden’s withdrawal from the race, this has turned everything upside down. She’s raised over $200 million in small donations in less than a week, and there is an estimated $160 million in Super PACs that have opened their purses for her. Still a hundred days to go before the election, but right now she is the clear front runner.
Trump managed to lose the good will with the general public that normally accrues around a politician who has been shot. Trump’s arrogance and secretiveness is part of that. He and his followers take the stance that the mental and physical health of a presidential candidate is none of the public’s goddamn business, and the public, whose lives depend on the fitness for office of said candidates, begs to differ. That stance began in 1944, when it became clear that Franklin Roosevelt’s ill health had been hidden (one picture that did get out showed that he was a very seriously ill man). Three months into his fourth term, he died of a stroke, leaving a woefully unprepared vice president to (hopefully) rise to the occasion.
Then Eisenhower had his heart attack, and the public looked at his vice president, Richard Nixon, and said, loudly and clearly, “Ike, you gotta level with us from now on.” And that’s been the norm for presidents and serious presidential contenders ever since. Except Trump.
Most of the public sense he’s hiding something because in nearly all circumstances, he is hiding something. His is a slimy trail of grift, corruption, venality and malice stretching back five decades.
Then there was his handling of the assassination attempt itself. Always a showman, he had the presence of mind to strike a rousing and heroic pose in the immediate aftermath (no, he wasn’t in shock, not for a wound that slight. If anything, it probably hadn’t even started to hurt yet). But after that, the usual tawdry venality stepped in. Politicians love to exploit such events to appear heroic and even noble, but the best Trump could manage was another set of tacky sneakers with a picture of his ‘heroic’ pose on them. And his secretiveness, always a danger sign with him. Public admiration ebbed outside of the MAGAsphere.
I wrote in that same conversation this morning, “I’m sure Trump was hoping for that, but he derailed the good will he might have gained, between his secretiveness and his avarice. All kinds of politicians have tried to exploit assassination attempts against them, but Trump is the first to sell tack[y] commemorative sneakers. He really should just move his entire campaign to the Home Shopping Network.”
Trump brayed that he drove Biden out of the race, and while the debate was an obvious factor, I think Biden simply realized that no matter what he did, the public was going to see him as an 82 year old man who wasn’t getting any younger. Time to leave with grace and dignity, and that’s just what he did. Trump’s brays that he drove Joe out fell flat with the public. I’ve said before that Biden will go down as the best one-term president in American history. And he will. His accomplishments are astounding.
Our Trump supporter made one more ploy at trying to garner sympathy for Trump, writing, “I understand it perfectly: Hate. They want to be able to make fun of him. You’ve already seen it. Making fun of the bandage, making fun of him dropping to the ground, making fun of him not holding out door events, questioning whether he was actually hit with a bullet at all… Hate. They want to make fun of him. They want to call him a liar. They want to minimize the attempt on his life. Because of hate.”
I replied, “People have very good reasons to despise Trump. He is, after all, a despicable human being by any metric you care to mention. But rather than feeling sorry for yourself, you should go out and find a better candidate. Like maybe, oh, I don’t know…Kamala Harris? She laughs, she punishes criminals, and she likes kids and cats.”
I’ve seen presidential election campaigns take sharp veers many times before: Nixon’s sabotage of the Peace Talks; the Eagleton affair; Reagan’s secret deal with Iran to keep the hostages until after the election; the Dukakis tank photo; Sarah Palin; the Comey letter. But nothing like this.
But then, we’ve never seen times quite like this before.
Prepare for a tumultuous autumn.
