Donald Trump appeared to be shot in the ear as shots were fired at the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump grabbed at the side of his face and blood spattered across his cheek as several popping sounds were heard.
All I’m seeing is people putting themselves into hysterics talking about it on social media, demanding that it has to be staged and his death would be an objectively good thing. And it’s all just people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but refuse to ever shut up.
The right is going to retaliate for this eventually, but Trump getting off with only a minor injury was the best possible outcome of this. If the injury was serious or fatal, the fascist bandit armies would come out in droves. It would be worse for everyone. Remember a few years ago when the right kept doing terror attacks in progressive spaces? Imagine how much worse that would be if their dear leader was murdered on camera. Liberals really need to stop celebrating the idea of this attempted assassination, all it did was open a door that none of us should want to go through. This is a rallying cry for the right, this is a green light for violence. The far-right will use this event for years to come to justify murders and hate crimes.
I don’t know, to some extent this take on it sounds like victim-blaming to me. Not that I’m saying you intend it that way, but like… “best possible outcome of this [because…] the fascist bandit armies would come out in droves [if he died]” seems like kind of a lose-lose situation for people to be in. If Trump is alive and kicking, he can win the presidency and continue to foment stochastic terrorism by riling up his base with more and more violent rhetoric, while also potentially instituting policies meant to harm his political faction opponents. If he’s not, they commit terrorism on his behalf.
I know it doesn’t all start and end with Trump (far from it and there’s plenty to be said about how fascist and imperialist the US already is under Biden and previous presidents before him and Trump) but from the standpoint of the kind of base Trump is the center of gravity for, him further riling it up or being a martyr both seem like bad outcomes to me in different ways. The “far-right” doesn’t need an excuse to do violence and already has been (I mean, the Jan 6 thing happened long before this). What they do need is power to be able to carry out what they want to do as more than random acts of terror and Trump represents a means of them getting that in some way. Though he is of course far from the only one in their circles willing to go there. He’s just currently the most charismatic and the center of gravity for pushing it.
Not disagreeing with you, but they would eventually turn to violence inevitably. Either through “legal” means as reactionaries restructure the government under Trump and his supporters, or through continued terrorism in areas or periods where he isn’t in power. It doesn’t matter if he’d gotten assassinated or if there had never been an attempt. His fanatics are convinced they’re in a holy war, and they look for any shared of evidence - real or imagined - to support that bias.
I’d wager you’re more annoyed at the hypocrisy of liberals wanting Trump dead than them simply wanting him dead, because I can guarantee his fash followers are going to do violence and terror regardless of any attempt, its success, or its failure.
This is exactly what I am seeing in Reddit with people throwing the accusation that the shooter is from “Antifa” and also calling for a purge. These chuds only need a small excuse to start murdering people and justify the dehumanization of any group of people that they are told to hate.
Exactly. They’ve been screeching about this decades before Trump, insisting the US is some Christian fascist paradise being besieged by an international cabal of communists. Every Trumpite politician I see yammers on about “the left” in every negative thing that happens. Trump didn’t need to get shot at for them to start marching with torches at Charlottesville, or to start attacking city infrastructure to target minorities, or to push state governments and courts to adopt more and more aggressive reactionary legislation. Yes, this will be their rallying cry, their “proof”, but with how much pressure reactionaries have been putting on citizens, it was only a matter of time until someone pushed back and gave them the excuse they wanted.
